The collector: the conquests and canvases of Peggy Guggenheim.

Entering Picasso's studio in Paris, in 1940, Peggy Guggenheim found the Master surrounded by a group of admirers. Her artistic mission for the past several months -- to buy a picture a day -- was widely known; most artists and dealers, anticipating a German attack, were desperate to sell anything they could before packing or hiding their works and fleeing the city. Leger, Giacometti, Man Ray: all eagerly delivered their work to the gawky American heiress, and few objected to her haggling over price. There were not many buyers, after all. "People even brought me paintings in the morning to bed," Guggenheim reported, "before I rose." She rarely bought on impulse, though, because she knew exactly what she was after. She had a list, compiled by experts, of artists who should be included in a first-class modern collection, and it had not taken her long to acquire a painting or sculpture by almost every one. The great exception, who ignored her pointedly as she hovered in his studio, finally glanced up to inform her that she had arrived at the wrong location. "Madame," Picasso said as he dismissed her, "you will find the lingerie department on the second floor."

Madame did not experience the rebuke as an extraordinary setback. This is not surprising, as she had barely registered the war as a setback to her plans to open a splendid new gallery in Paris. On April 10, 1940, the day after Hitler's troops entered Denmark and Norway, Guggenheim rented an enormous apartment on the Place Vendome, and she went so far as to have the little plaster cherubs chopped off the walls and the place suitably repainted for the display of her treasures before, at last, she admitted defeat, just weeks before France did the same. Dangerous weeks, it might be said, for a woman with a prominent Jewish name. By her own account, however, Guggenheim seems to have been disturbed mostly by the French refusal to protect her art: Leger had advised her to ask the Louvre for storage space, but the august museum pronounced her entire collection not worth saving. "A Kandinsky, several Klees and Picabias, a Cubist Braque, a Gris, a Leger," Guggenheim fumed, along with Surrealist paintings by Miro, Max Ernst, Chirico, Tanguy, Dali, Magritte: all this had to find refuge in a friend's barn in the Vichy countryside. She, however, stayed put; she was enjoying the attentions of a new lover, who was himself prevented from leaving Paris, she said, because his wife was too ill to be moved. And so, as the bombing reached the factories on the outer boulevards, and trains filled with refugees in direst need poured into the city, she sat in cafes and drank champagne.

"I can't imagine why I didn't go to the aid of all those unfortunate people," Guggenheim wrote, in a memoir published shortly after the war. "But I just didn't." She dutifully recorded her escape from Paris to the South of France and then on to Lisbon, a trail of rumpled beds and moral quandaries, before she managed to catch a Pan Am Clipper flight to New York in July, 1941. At forty-two, Guggenheim had been living abroad for nearly twenty years, and she was bringing back with her the chaotically extended family that she had acquired: her ex-husband and their two teen-age children, her ex-husband's soon-to-be ex-wife and their children, and the painter Max Ernst, who counted as family because he was already, in Guggenheim's mind, her husband-to-be. In her memoir, she recounted the reasons that she had fallen in love with Ernst: "because he is so beautiful, because he is such a good painter and because he is so famous."

Despite the book's occasional flush of naive charm, it is hard to think of another memoir that so determinedly assassinates the character of its author. By the time Guggenheim began writing it, in 1944, her dream of a first-class modern gallery had become a reality, not on the Place Vendome but over a grocery on West Fifty-seventh Street, and she was presiding over an art world so tumultuously new that no one could have made a list of who the important figures would turn out to be. And yet almost every major artist of mid-twentieth-century America -- Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell, Cornell, Nevelson, de Kooning -- showed at Guggenheim's Art of This Century, as the gallery was called: it was the place where American art came into its own. With it, Guggenheim achieved a reputation for daring and for an instinctive grasp of talent that not even the publication of her self-mortifying self-appraisal, titled "Out of This Century" -- one reviewer called it "Out of My Head" -- was fully able to destroy. To complete the job, it seems, we have biographers.

Anton Gill's "Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim" (HarperCollins; $29.95) claims that "the jury remains out" on the question of whether Guggenheim had a good eye -- as opposed to merely having good advisers -- but he has no difficulty in passing judgment on her as a woman. "A mixture of low self-esteem and aggression, aided by money" is how he describes her behavior in his first few pages; "essentially selfish," he continues, and states as categorical "her inability to give anything in return for what she took." According to Gill, Guggenheim was an inadequate friend, an inept wife, and -- to cite his most frequent and furious charge -- a catastrophic mother. Her "most successful relationships," he writes, "were with animals and works of art," but his book is more informative about Guggenheim's feelings for her Lhasa Apsos than for the talents of Jackson Pollock, to whom she gave his first four one-man shows. ...