Peggy Guggenheim, one of the greatest patrons of the last century, loved to surround herself with works of ethnic art that she exhibited in her Venetian palace, mixing them according to her whim with the marvellous works of contemporary art in her collection. It was an authentic and genuine passion that stemmed from exquisitely phenomenological evaluations and the fashion of the time, which saw in the ‘exotic objects’ a sort of quintessential expression of that genuine creativity and vision capable of transcending the paradigms of reality that characterised the expressive poetics of the avant-gardes. From the photographs of the period that are still preserved in the Guggenheim Collection’s Iconographic Archive and from the information we have about them, there must have been about fifty works, mostly from Africa and Oceania. Of these 35 are now preserved in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, of which only a few are on public display. The idea behind the exhibition and the Catalogue linked to it is to present, after careful restoration conducted by MUSEC’s Restoration and Technical Museum Laboratory and important scientific research conducted by specialists in the field, the works of ethnic art that adorned Palazzo Venier dei Leoni until the collector’s death. The project for the enhancement of this collection stems from the collaboration between Galleria Gottardo, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and MUSEC, and from the desire to rediscover the very special significance that the works represent in themselves and in the context in which they were acquired.