Peggy Guggenheim in London

It’s January 1938. American collector and patron of the arts Peggy Guggenheim has just opened her first gallery on Cork Street in London, Mayfair. Over the next year and a half, this gallery, ‘Guggenheim Jeune’, will become a hub for avant-gardes, and renowned for promoting groundbreaking developments by local and international artists, many affiliated with Surrealism and Abstraction. It was a defining moment for Peggy Guggenheim – the catalyst for her becoming the art collector she is known as today – and the artists she represented. She hosted over 20 exhibitions, from the first UK solo shows of Vasily Kandinsky to the first UK show of collage, and a contemporary sculpture exhibition that caused a 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. 88 years after her gallery opened, the artists championed by Peggy Guggenheim are going to make a splash in London all over again. Exhibition organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London.