Peggy Guggenheim’s influential—and short-lived—London gallery to be celebrated in new show in Venice and at London’s Royal Academy

The first painting Lucian Freud ever exhibited will be a highlight of a show dedicated to the legacy of Peggy Guggenheim’s groundbreaking contribution to the development of 20th-century art.

Her London gallery Guggenheim Jeune’s brief tenure—it opened in Cork Street in January 1938 and closed 18 months later—makes its influence on the direction of contemporary art in Britain in the 20th century even more remarkable. And it will be celebrated with Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector, an exhibition of more than a 100 works opening at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in spring 2026 (25 April-19 October 2026) before touring to the Royal Academy in London (21 November 2026-14 March 2027). “The story we want to tell focuses on Guggenheim’s enormous personal contribution to the visibility and acceptance of contemporary art in London at that time,” says Grazina Subelyte, an associate curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and a co-curator of the exhibition.

“Guggenheim Jeune showed the most up-to-the-minute art—Salvador Dali, Eileen Agar, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Piet Mondrian among them—at a time when London wasn’t the stage for contemporary art in the way it is now. Indeed, Peggy paved the way for that. Her exhibition of contemporary sculpture in April 1938 was the first event of its kind, and included works by Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Constantin Brâncuși. In fact, it was so trailblazing that the director of the Tate was required to certify that it actually was sculpture, to avoid Peggy having to pay import duty.”

In all, there were more than 20 exhibitions at Guggenheim Jeune before it closed on the eve of the Second World War. Among the other standout shows was Vasily Kandinsky’s first solo London exhibition, including his pivotal piece Dominant Curve (1936). Other highlights included the first-ever major collage group show in Britain, which included works by an artist who would later be Guggenheim’s husband, Max Ernst; portraits by Cedric Morris; and individual shows for the French painter Yves Tanguy and the Danish Surrealist Rita Kernn-Larsen. “This was the first exhibition of surrealism Peggy ever organised—and surrealism and abstraction would be the art movements she would always be connected with,” Subelyte says.

According to her co-curator, the editor of Picpus magazine Simon Grant, it may have been her personal interest in progressive education—both her own children went to innovative schools—that led her to organise an exhibition of works by children, in which the teenage Lucian Freud showed his painting Old Men Running (1936). “We have almost no archival material about the exhibition, which took place in October 1938,” he says. “Peggy referenced the Freud work later as Running Men but I think she misremembered it, and the painting shown was Old Man Running. This was the first time a work by Freud was ever shown in a public gallery.”

Overall, Grant says, Guggenheim was remarkable for her risk-taking and her openness to showing unknown artists. “The list of people whose work she showed at Guggenheim Jeune is extraordinary, many of them went on to become household names, but they certainly weren’t that at the time. Take the Austrian Mexican painter Wolfgang Paalen, he was fairly unknown in the UK at the time, and she gave him a show. There was plenty happening around Modern art in Europe back then, but she was one of a few people who were pioneering it in Britain.”

Although Guggenheim Jeune was a huge success in terms of launching contemporary artists in Britain, it lost money financially. Peggy closed it hoping to open a Museum of Modern Art in London, along with her chief artistic adviser Herbert Read; but in the event the war intervened, and the artists whose work was shown at the London gallery became the basis for the collection she later moved to Venice, now housed in her palazzo on the Grand Canal.