The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is turning to a formative but often secondary chapter in the collector’s life: her years in London and the short-lived gallery Guggenheim Jeune. Opening on April 25 and running through October 19, 2026, Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector is presented as the first large-scale museum exhibition devoted to her time in the United Kingdom and to the gallery she operated in Cork Street between 1938 and 1939.
The show arrives with institutional weight behind it. It is organized by Gražina Subelytė, curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and guest curator Simon Grant, and it will travel after Venice to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, from November 21, 2026, to March 14, 2027, before continuing to Guggenheim New York from April 16 to September 12, 2027. That itinerary underscores the exhibition’s ambition to position Guggenheim’s London years as a transatlantic story rather than a local footnote.
According to the museum, Guggenheim Jeune was active for only 18 months, from January 1938 through June 1939, but it functioned as a beacon for avant-garde art in the lead-up to World War II. The gallery promoted local and international artists associated with abstraction and Surrealism, and hosted more than twenty exhibitions. Among them were Vasily Kandinsky’s first solo show in London, a monographic exhibition of Jean Cocteau, the first group exhibition devoted to collage in the United Kingdom, and a controversial contemporary sculpture exhibition.
The exhibition brings together key works shown in those pioneering displays, alongside related works from the same period by artists including Eileen Agar, Barbara Hepworth, Kandinsky, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Cedric Morris, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. It also includes archival material documenting a period the museum describes as one of intense experimentation and cultural vibrancy. Highlighted works on the exhibition page include Kandinsky’s Cossacks (Fragment zu Komposition IV), Mondrian’s Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red / Composition with Red, Taeuber-Arp’s Equilibrium, and Rita Kernn-Larsen’s Self-Portrait (Know Thyself).
The curatorial framing places Guggenheim not simply as a buyer of modern art, but as an active promoter of emerging and radical artistic languages. The museum says the exhibition sheds light on a crucial period that helped define her as a collector and patron, and it points to her network of influential friends, including Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and Mary Reynolds, as part of the context that shaped her vision. In that sense, the show does more than revisit a biography; it maps the formation of a collecting identity that would later influence the trajectory of twentieth-century art.
The Venetian presentation is accompanied by public programs and an illustrated catalogue published by Marsilio Arte, featuring new essays by a range of scholars and art historians. The museum has also announced related events, including guided tours and talks, extending the exhibition’s scholarly reach into the public program. By foregrounding a brief but decisive period in London, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is using a single collector’s archive to illuminate the international networks, exhibition strategies, and artist friendships that helped shape modernism on both sides of the Atlantic.
