Pegeen Vail Guggenheim
American painter (1925–1967)
Pegeen Vail Guggenheim (August 18, 1925 – March 1, 1967) was a Swiss-born American painter. Her work combines surrealism and naïve art.
She was the daughter of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim and the writer Laurence Vail, and the granddaughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who died on the RMS Titanic in 1912.
Life
Pegeen Vail Guggenheim was born as Pegeen Jezebel Margaret Vail in Ouchy, Switzerland, and spent her childhood in France and England. In 1941, she left Europe for the United States with her mother, Peggy Guggenheim, and Max Ernst, who later became her stepfather. In the U.S., she studied at Finch College.
In 1943, she met the French painter Jean Hélion, who, along with his friends Piet Mondrian and Fernand Léger, helped introduce abstract art in the U.S. Guggenheim married Hélion in New York in 1946. The couple moved to Paris the same year. They had three children together: Fabrice, David, and Nicolas Hélion. When they divorced in 1956, Pegeen left Paris with her youngest son, Nicolas, to live with her mother in Venice.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pegeen Vail Guggenheim” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.