A French court has thrown out a legal action by relatives of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim to have her Italian collection, which includes works by Picasso, Miró, Matisse and Dalí, restored to its original appearance and purpose.
The court case, known as Guggenheim v Guggenheim, pitted two of the celebrated collector’s grandsons against another branch of the family represented by the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation.
The French family had claimed the US foundation was not respecting Guggenheim’s wishes regarding her collection of contemporary masters displayed in a magnificent 18th-century palace on Venice’s Grand Canal.
Peggy Guggenheim, who died 36 years ago, inherited her fortune from her father, Benjamin, a metal magnate who died in the Titanic disaster. She used the fortune to amass an impressive collection of contemporary art.
Before she died she handed over the Palazzo Vernier dei Leoni, where the 326 masterpieces were displayed, to the New York-based Solomon Guggenheim Foundation then run by her cousin Harry Guggenheim.
Her grandson Sandro Rumney, who was born in Italy but lives in France, and his half-brother Nicolas Hélion, along with their five children, brought a legal action in France claiming the foundation had gone against Guggenheim’s wish that the collection should remain intact.
They complained that works from other collections were now on display at the palazzo and that this had diluted their grandmother’s work, intended to be left as a legacy of her passion for art.
Three other grandchildren and a great-grandchild had supported the foundation, which described the allegations from the French branch of the family as baseless.
Rumney and the other plaintiffs were ordered by the court to pay the foundation €30,000 (£22,000) in legal fees.
