Exhibitions
Peggy Guggenheim in London: the birth of a great collector
In the spring of 2026, Venice's Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector , the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the years the legendary patron and collector lived in the UK and the history of Guggenheim Jeune, the London gallery she ran between 1938 and 1939.
Curated by Gražina Subelytė, curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, together with guest curator Simon Grant, the exhibition will be on view in Venice from April 25 to October 19, 2026. It will then travel to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where it will be on view from November 21, 2026 to March 14, 2027, before concluding its tour at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, from April 16 to September 12, 2027.
Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Cossacks (Fragment zu Komposition IV), 1910–11, Tate, London, Presented by Mrs Hazel McKinley, 1938.
The exhibition revisits a pivotal chapter in Peggy Guggenheim's career. For just eighteen months, between January 1938 and June 1939, her gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, became one of the leading centers for the dissemination of the most innovative artistic movements of the time. From this London space, Guggenheim supported artists associated with abstraction and surrealism, solidifying her role as one of the great promoters of 20th-century avant-garde art.
The project also explores the network of friends and collaborators who decisively influenced the formation of his artistic vision. Figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and Mary Reynolds accompanied Guggenheim during those years of intense cultural effervescence and helped define the sensibility that would later make his collection an international benchmark.
Throughout its brief but momentous existence, Guggenheim Jeune organized more than twenty exhibitions that marked a turning point in the British art scene. These included Vasily Kandinsky's first solo exhibition in London, a monographic show dedicated to Jean Cocteau, the first group exhibition of collage in the UK, and a groundbreaking—and controversial—exhibition of contemporary sculpture.
Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959), Octopus Sky (Ciel de pieuvre), 1938, Private collection, Courtesy Malingue SA, Paris.
The exhibition brings together some of the works that were featured in those historic shows, as well as pieces created during the same period by artists such as Eileen Agar, Barbara Hepworth, Kandinsky, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Cedric Morris, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, among others. The exhibition is complemented by documents and archival materials that reveal the experimental intensity and cultural dynamism of the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War II.
Beyond recalling a pioneering gallery, “Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector” reveals the moment when a passionate art lover transformed into one of the most influential patrons of the 20th century, able to recognize and support the voices that would forever change the history of modern art.
The presentation in Venice is supported by The KHR McNeely Family Foundation, represented by Kevin, Rosemary and Hannah Rose McNeely, whose contribution has made this ambitious exhibition possible.
You may be
interested
...
