Peggy Guggenheim in London exhibition to open at the Royal Academy of Arts

The Royal Academy of Arts will examine Peggy Guggenheim’s formative years in the London art world with Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector, opening on 21 November 2026. Presented in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries until 14 March 2027, the exhibition will bring together more than 80 works spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, printmaking and photography.

The exhibition focuses on Guggenheim Jeune, the gallery Peggy Guggenheim operated at 30 Cork Street from January 1938 to June 1939. Located close to the Royal Academy, it became an important London platform for Surrealism, abstraction and experimental modern art during a period of growing political uncertainty across Europe.

Over the course of 18 months, Guggenheim Jeune presented more than 20 exhibitions. Its programme included the first UK solo exhibitions devoted to Vasily Kandinsky, Jean Cocteau and Yves Tanguy, as well as Britain’s first group exhibition of collage. A contemporary sculpture show also provoked public debate after the Director of the Tate reportedly refused to recognise several of its works as art when they arrived at British Customs.

The Royal Academy exhibition will reunite works associated with these landmark presentations, with several returning to London for the first time since they were shown at Guggenheim Jeune. Featured artists will include Eileen Agar, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Vasily Kandinsky, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Henry Moore, Piet Mondrian, Cedric Morris, Grace Pailthorpe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Yves Tanguy.

Organised around key exhibitions from the gallery’s history, the display will trace the artists, ideas and relationships that influenced Guggenheim’s developing vision as a collector. It will begin with portraiture, including paintings by Cedric Morris and photographs by Gisèle Freund that introduce the friends and advisers surrounding Guggenheim at the time.

Objects from Guggenheim’s personal jewellery collection will also be displayed. Among them will be Earrings for Peggy Guggenheim, created by Tanguy around 1938 and incorporating miniature Surrealist paintings.

The opening section will additionally revisit Guggenheim Jeune’s 1938 exhibition of paintings and drawings by children, reflecting her interest in education as a means of encouraging artistic expression. It will include Lucian Freud’s first exhibited work, Old Man Running, made in 1937–38 when the artist was a teenager.

A section dedicated primarily to organic abstraction will explore the gallery’s solo exhibitions of Kandinsky, Charles Howard and other artists. These works will be shown alongside examples associated with the controversial Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture. The display will also include prints produced by artists connected to S.W. Hayter’s Studio 17, originally featured in an influential pre-war London printmaking exhibition.

The exhibition will then consider wider approaches to abstraction through the Exhibition of Abstract and Concrete Art. The original presentation brought British artists together with European contemporaries including Mondrian and Taeuber-Arp, at a time when artists such as Otto Freundlich were fleeing the rise of Fascism.

Collage will be represented through works by Agar and Paule Vézelay, while puppets created by Marie Vassilieff will demonstrate the range of media included in Guggenheim’s programme. These sections will also examine the opportunities the gallery created for women artists. The concluding galleries will turn to Surrealism through works by Kernn-Larsen, Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and Wolfgang Paalen.

Although Guggenheim intended to establish a permanent museum of modern art in London, the outbreak of the Second World War brought those plans to an end. She left for Paris and later New York before settling in Venice, where the collection she developed became the foundation of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

By returning to the brief but influential history of Guggenheim Jeune, Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector will explore how its exhibitions contributed to London’s modern art scene and shaped Guggenheim’s approach to collecting.

The exhibition is organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts. It is curated by Gražina Subelytė, Curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and independent curator Simon Grant, with Sylvie Broussine, Associate Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts.