Between January 1938 and June 1939, Guggenheim Jeune – the first gallery set up by the collector Peggy Guggenheim, the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Guggenheim Museum in New York – staged 21 exhibitions at its space in Mayfair. The quality was no less impressive than the quantity: among the shows were the first exhibitions in the UK dedicated to Jean Cocteau, Wassily Kandinsky and Yves Tanguy. ‘I am not an art collector,’ she would later say. ‘I am a museum.’ Although she abandoned plans to set up a museum of modern art in London, choosing instead to return to Paris in 1939 to build up her collection there, her years in the British capital not only helped establish her reputation internationally but also gave Britain a healthy exposure to European modernism. This exhibition in Venice features work from some of those shows, pieces by contemporaneous artists including Piet Mondrian and Sophie Taeuber-Arp and archival material that gives a flavour of the avant-garde scene on both sides of the Channel (25 April–19 October).
Find out more from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s website.
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