Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector

In the late 1930s, Peggy Guggenheim launched an art gallery in Mayfair that shocked the conservative tastes of the British art establishment. This exhibition revisits the gallery that helped redefine London’s contemporary art scene.

It’s January 1938. The American collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim has just opened her first gallery on Cork Street, just around the corner from the Royal Academy. Over the next year and a half, ‘Guggenheim Jeune’ will become one of the radical voices for progress amid London’s conservative art institutions, promoting works affiliated with Surrealism and abstraction that will change the fate of contemporary art in Britain.

The launch of the gallery was a defining moment for Peggy Guggenheim and the catalyst for her becoming the art collector she is known as today. She hosted over 20 exhibitions, including the first UK solo show of Vasily Kandinsky, the first exhibition of collage in Britain, and a contemporary sculpture exhibition that became a national scandal.

This exhibition reunites key pieces from these pioneering displays, and similar works from the period, by artists including Eileen Agar, Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Henry Moore, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Cedric Morris, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and more. These artists’ groundbreaking works ushered in new possibilities and appetites for avant-garde art in Britain.

88 years after her gallery opened, Peggy Guggenheim and the artists she championed are going to make a splash in London all over again.

£17

Tues-Thurs & Sun: 10am-6pm

Fri-Sat: 10am-9pm