Peggy Guggenheim - Private Life

Private Life

According to both Guggenheim and her biographer Anton Gill, Guggenheim had a voracious sexual appetite. She claimed to have had affairs with numerous artists and writers, and in return many artists and others have claimed affairs with her. She is even mentioned as having had affairs with fictional characters, for example William Boyd's Nat Tate.

Her first marriage was to Laurence Vail, a Dada sculptor and writer with whom she had two children, Michael Cedric Sindbad and Pegeen Vail. They divorced about 1928 following his affair with writer Kay Boyle, whom he later married. Soon after her first marriage dissolved, she briefly married John Holms, a writer with writer's block who had been a war hero. Starting in late December 1939, she and Samuel Beckett had a brief but intense affair, and he encouraged her to turn exclusively to modern art. She married her third husband, Max Ernst, in 1941 and divorced him in 1946. She has eight grandchildren: Clovis, Mark, Karole and Julia Vail, from her son, and Fabrice, David and Nicolas Hélion and Sandro Rumney from her daughter.