Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a Collector
- 19h
- 4 min read
From April 25 to October 19, 2026, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a Collector, the first and most comprehensive museum exhibition ever dedicated to Peggy Guggenheim’s London experience and her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, active at 30 Cork Street between 1938 and 1939. Curated by Gražina Subelytė, Curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and Simon Grant, Guest Curator, the exhibition reconstructs a crucial chapter in Guggenheim’s life—one that definitively shaped her future role as a collector and patron of twentieth-century art.
The gallery played a fundamental role in shaping the British art scene in the interwar period, increasing the visibility and acceptance of contemporary art at a time when London institutions remained largely conservative. Alongside galleries such as the Redfern Gallery, the Mayor Gallery, and the London Gallery, Guggenheim Jeune challenged established norms and provided an essential platform for avant-garde art. This period was also decisive in defining Peggy Guggenheim’s identity as a patron of the arts, determined to found a museum of modern art in London — a vision ultimately realized in Venice.
Within just eighteen months, Guggenheim Jeune became one of the principal reference points for the artistic avant-gardes of the time, distinguishing itself through the promotion of local and international artists — many connected to Surrealist and abstract movements — and through a bold, experimental program.
In a remarkably short span, from January 1938 to June 1939, Peggy Guggenheim organized more than twenty exhibitions and achieved numerous curatorial milestones, including the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom dedicated to Vasily Kandinsky, a monographic exhibition devoted to Jean Cocteau, the first British exhibition entirely dedicated to collage, a contemporary sculpture exhibition that provoked widespread controversy, and a show featuring works created by children, including a painting by a very young Lucian Freud — marking the celebrated British artist’s exhibition debut.
The exhibition brings together around one hundred key works from major international institutions and private collections, originally shown in these pioneering exhibitions, alongside comparable works from the same period and works by artists whom Peggy Guggenheim would later collect. These include, among others, Eileen Agar, Jean (Hans) Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Vasily Kandinsky, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Cedric Morris, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Yves Tanguy.
The exhibition path includes paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, puppets, and archival materials, conveying the extraordinary variety of languages presented in the gallery and documenting a period of intense artistic experimentation and cultural ferment, marked by profound social and political tensions on the eve of the Second World War. Central to the narrative is also the relational dimension of Peggy Guggenheim’s London experience: the exhibition highlights the decisive role of her friendships and collaborations with key figures of modernism, including Arp, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, and Mary Reynolds, as well as the importance of the network of gallerists and intellectuals active in London during those years.
The exhibition opens with key works of abstraction and Surrealism shown during the brief but intense activity of Guggenheim Jeune, reflecting the principal artistic tendencies underpinning the gallery’s program. Subsequent rooms are devoted to individual exhibitions organized in this space, including those dedicated to Kandinsky, the Russian artist Marie Vassilieff — creator of the genre of “art dolls” and a key figure in transdisciplinary practice — and the contemporary sculpture exhibition, a landmark cultural event in prewar London that demonstrated Peggy Guggenheim’s decisive role in promoting and advancing the acceptance of modern and abstract art in England.
The exhibition continues with portraits by Cedric Morris, a Welsh artist central to the British avant-garde scene, while another gallery is dedicated to exhibitions by American painter Charles Howard, German sculptor Heinz Henghes, and the Studio 17 exhibition — the printmaking workshop founded by Stanley William Hayter. This is followed by a tribute to the historic exhibition Abstract and Concrete Art, featuring works by artists such as Mondrian, Taeuber-Arp, and Van Doesburg.
A gallery is also dedicated to Gisèle Freund’s color photographic portraits, originally presented at Guggenheim Jeune in projection form — a display method the artist favored throughout her life to present her color transparencies of artists and intellectuals. The final rooms bring together works by artists included in the collage exhibition and in the various Surrealist shows, including Kernn-Larsen, André Masson, Reuben Mednikoff, Wolfgang Paalen, Grace Pailthorpe, Man Ray, Tanguy, and John Tunnard.
The exhibition also serves as a tribute to Peggy Guggenheim’s deep affection for England, which she always considered her spiritual homeland and with which she maintained strong ties. Reflecting on her life in a 1976 interview, she stated: “I have been in love with Venice for fifty years. If I did not live here, I would live in the English countryside.”
Following its presentation in Venice, Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a Collector will travel to the Royal Academy of Arts in London from November 21, 2026, to March 14, 2027, strengthening the international dialogue around a central figure in twentieth-century art history and the context that shaped her development, before continuing to the Guggenheim New York in spring 2027.