The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice has opened "Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector," the first major museum exhibition focused on Guggenheim's brief but influential 18-month tenure as a gallerist in pre-war London. From January 1938 to June 1939, her gallery Guggenheim Jeune at 30 Cork Street mounted twenty exhibitions, including Vasily Kandinsky's first UK solo show, the first British group collage exhibition, and a controversial sculpture show debated in Parliament. Organized by Gražina Subelytė and guest curator Simon Grant, the show brings together approximately one hundred works—paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, puppets, and archival material—many reunited for the first time since their original presentation.
This exhibition matters because it reframes Guggenheim not merely as a legendary collector but as a pioneering gallerist who used her London gallery as a form of quiet political resistance, championing women artists and émigrés fleeing fascism. It highlights how her pre-war activities shaped her identity as a patron and helped shift the art world's center from Paris to New York. After Venice, the show travels to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2026–2027) and then to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2027), underscoring the enduring significance of this formative period in modern art history.