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The palazzo itself dates to the mid-18th century, begun by the Venier family and never finished beyond a single story -- its low, truncated silhouette on the Grand Canal is a direct result of that unfinished construction, not a stylistic choice. Peggy Guggenheim, an American heiress and art collector, bought the palazzo in 1949 to house the modern art collection she had spent the preceding decade assembling in Europe and New York.
Guggenheim had already opened a gallery in London and, later, "Art of This Century" in New York, where she gave early solo shows to then-unknown American artists, most consequentially Jackson Pollock, whose career she directly helped launch. Moving her collection to Venice in 1949 relocated a major body of Cubist, Surrealist, and early Abstract Expressionist work to a city that had almost no modern art presence at the time. She opened the palazzo to visitors during her own lifetime, and on her death in 1979 bequeathed both the building and the collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which continues to operate it as a public museum.
Peggy Guggenheim was both the collection's creator and one of the era's most consequential art patrons -- her personal relationships with artists including Max Ernst (briefly her husband), Jackson Pollock, and Yves Tanguy directly shaped which artists' work entered wider public and market recognition. Marino Marini, an Italian sculptor, created "The Angel of the City," the bronze equestrian figure that stands in the garden facing the Grand Canal, one of the collection's most recognizable and most debated works.
What began as one collector's private taste became, through the Guggenheim Foundation's stewardship, a public institution -- the collection's scope has been left essentially as Peggy Guggenheim assembled it, giving visitors a document of one influential eye's judgment rather than a museum-committee survey of the period.
The museum remains one of Venice's few major venues for modern and contemporary art, complementing the city's Renaissance and Byzantine institutions, and Guggenheim herself is buried in the garden alongside the graves of her dogs, a detail that keeps the museum tied unusually directly to its founder even decades after her death.