Famous private art collections on show in Italy

"Peggy wanted to understand the artistic effervescence of Europe at the time so she simply moved here," Berbero says.

In the Paris of the roaring '20s she mixed with poets, writers, painters and sculptors, serving both as patron and muse.

Important purchases during the interwar period included Italian sculptor Giacometti's Woman Walking and Picasso's The Dream and Lie of Franco.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Peggy Guggenheim was transformed from socialite collector to a mother figure desperately trying to protect her artists in the face of the Nazi threat.

She was forced to flee Europe herself in 1941 and Pollock, who has 18 works in the exhibition, was one of the major beneficiaries of the time she spent back in the United States.

In 1943 she gave him a contract that enabled him to give up his work as a maintenance man and devote himself full time to his art.

The exhibition opens with works by Kandinsky, Duchamp and Ernst and then goes on to explore postwar developments on both sides of the Atlantic, contrasting the work of Europe's informalist school including Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana with the abstract expressionism of Pollock and Rothko and the later development of pop art led by Roy Lichtenstein.

Palazzo Strozzi was chosen as the venue because it was here that Peggy Guggenheim first showed the collection that was later to find a permanent home in Venice, shortly after her return to Europe.

Twenty-five works from that original exhibition are back in Florence for this one.

Highlights include Kandinsky's Dominant Curve (1936), which Peggy Guggenheim owned but sold in what she later counted as one of the "seven tragedies in her life as a collector", and Francis Bacon's Study for Chimpanzee (1957).

Rarely shown outside Venice, the collector was so fond of Bacon's work she generally had it hanging in her bedroom.