Image: Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Dominant Curve (Courbe dominante), April 1936. Oil on canvas, 129.2 x 194.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection
The Royal Academy of Arts in London will present ‘Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector’, an exhibition bringing together works by Vasily Kandinsky, Salvador Dalí and Rita Kernn-Larsen. The exhibition will run from 21 November 2026 to 14 March 2027 at the Royal Academy of Arts.
The exhibition is framed around Guggenheim’s emergence as a collector and her role in the energy of a defining moment for modern art. According to the Royal Academy’s announcement, the presentation will reunite works by the three named artists, alongside works by other artists, to recapture the atmosphere of the period.
The show’s title refers specifically to Guggenheim’s London years and to the formation of her collecting activities. The Royal Academy’s announcement notes that the exhibition arrives 88 years after Guggenheim opened the doors of her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune. Guggenheim Jeune opened on Cork Street in Mayfair in January 1938 and ran until June 1939, hosting more than twenty exhibitions in eighteen months, among them Kandinsky’s first solo show in London, a monographic Jean Cocteau exhibition, the first group exhibition devoted to collage in the United Kingdom and a contemporary sculpture show that caused a national scandal. The exhibition reunites key works from those displays together with similar works of the period and archival material, by artists including Eileen Agar, Barbara Hepworth, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Cedric Morris and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
The selection will include work associated with Guggenheim’s collection in Venice. Image information accompanying the Royal Academy’s exhibition announcement identifies Salvador Dalí’s ‘Untitled’ from 1931 as being in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. The caption describes the exhibition as organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Kandinsky, Dalí and Kernn-Larsen represent distinct strands within the exhibition’s account of modern art, and the organiser’s and venue’s own pages name specific loans, including Kandinsky’s ‘Dominant Curve’ of April 1936 and Kernn-Larsen’s ‘Self-portrait (Know Thyself)’ of 1937, alongside Henry Moore’s ‘Reclining Figure’ of 1938, André Masson’s ‘Ondine’ and Yves Tanguy’s ‘The Sun in its Jewel Case’, both 1937, and Eileen Agar’s ‘Collage Head’ of 1937. The announcement presents their inclusion as part of a broader group of works intended to evoke the artistic momentum of the period rather than as a survey of any single artist’s practice.
The exhibition is organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, curated by Gražina Subelytė, curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, with guest curator Simon Grant. It opened in Venice on 25 April 2026 and runs there until 19 October 2026, before the London presentation; it then travels to the Guggenheim in New York from 16 April to 12 September 2027. In London it will be shown in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at Burlington House on Piccadilly. The Guggenheim exhibition will form part of the institution’s announced programme for the period, which also includes ‘Rembrandt: Radical Printmaker’, scheduled for 9 April to 19 September 2027, and later exhibitions devoted to the Summer Exhibition, the Museum Berggruen collection and Simone Leigh. Those programmes are separate from the Guggenheim presentation.
‘Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector’ will be on view in London from 21 November 2026 through 14 March 2027.
