From the July/August 2026 issue of Apollo.
When in her eighties, the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim lived in an unfinished palazzo in Venice from which she sallied forth for two hours every day in her gondola. She had given up collecting, lamenting the commercialisation of the art world, but was keen to establish her rightful place in the history of modern art. It was in Venice that she achieved her first recognition, treated like a country unto herself when invited to show her collection in the Greek Pavilion in 1948. For the 1958 Biennale, in the garden of her palazzo, she erected her own pavilion (which she called the barchessa) as an extension to her crammed house museum.
Now a temporary exhibition space, the barchessa is currently showing ‘Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector’, which explores the Anglophile years in which Guggenheim became a collector and champion of contemporary art. In 1937, a decade before she moved to Venice, Guggenheim was living in a timber-framed cottage in Hampshire; her mother had died that year, boosting her inheritance, and she had recently ended a volcanic union with her first husband, the ‘King of Bohemia’ Laurence Vail. She was restless and her friend the writer Peggy Waldman encouraged her to occupy herself with ‘serious work’, suggesting that she start a publishing house or art gallery.
Guggenheim Jeune, the London gallery that lasted from 1938 to 1939, was the result of this enterprise. It occupied a former pawnbroker’s shop on the second floor of 30 Cork Street, just behind the Royal Academy, and hosted 21 commercial exhibitions in its short life. The gallery put on the first exhibitions in the UK of work by Kandinsky and Yves Tanguy – but amazingly, no photographs of any of its trailblazing exhibitions survive. Baroness Rebay, her uncle Solomon’s mistress and curator, accused Guggenheim of ‘poor taste’ in using the illustrious family name, ‘which stands for an ideal in art’, as ‘a useful boost to some small shop’.
The current survey, curated by Gražina Subelytė and Simon Grant, assembles an impressive collection of striking artworks originally shown in the gallery. However, in approaching the subject exhibition by exhibition, and at pains to assert Guggenheim’s seriousness as a patron of the avant-garde, her personality and trademark flamboyance is somewhat lost in the story. In her memoir, Out of This Century (1946), which devotes a chapter to Guggenheim Jeune, Guggenheim portrays the birth of the gallery as entertainingly haphazard.
She presents herself as more of an enthusiast for men than art, her interest in it learned through her many bohemian lovers. At the time, Guggenheim was having a short-lived affair with the Surrealist Humphrey Jennings, who with ‘his ugly, emaciated body […] looked like Donald Duck’. Jennings introduced her to London’s artistic intelligentsia, accompanied her to Paris to solicit artists and helped in the hunt for a gallery space. He had organised the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, which Guggenheim had not bothered to see: ‘I much preferred Old Masters,’ she admitted of her then conservative tastes. ‘I couldn’t distinguish one thing in art from another.’
Marcel Duchamp, whom she had met in New York, educated her in the difference between abstract and Surrealist art, and in Paris introduced her to Kandinsky and Jean Arp, from whom she bought the bronze Head and Shell, which became the first object in her collection. Duchamp suggested Jean Cocteau’s drawings for the gallery’s inaugural exhibition and he helped hang the show and ‘made it look beautiful’. Samuel Beckett, with whom Guggenheim had embarked on a passionate 13-month affair, translated the catalogue. It was Beckett who encouraged her to ‘accept the art of our day as if it were a living thing’.
The force behind the gallery, and its sole employee, was Guggenheim’s friend the typographer Wyn Henderson, who suggested the gallery’s name and also designed the logo, with its modern sans serif font, as well as the handsome invitations and catalogues, many of which are on display here. Henderson, a promiscuous Titianesque beauty in her youth, with a ‘zest for life’, was always ‘egging’ Guggenheim on in her amorous pursuits (perhaps, one can’t help thinking, to get her out of the way). Once, when asked how many husbands she’d had, Guggenheim replied: ‘Mine, or other people’s?’
It is tempting, with two women at the helm – unusual for the time – to look for evidence of feminism in the gallery’s programming. Cocteau suggested that Guggenheim put on an exhibition of Marie Vassilieff, who created witty portrait dolls for French experimental theatre groups, which were shown alongside works by ceramicist Jill Salaman. The gallery also exhibited Danish painter Rita Kernn-Larsen and sculptures by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, but exhibiting female artists was never a deliberate strategy. ‘I don’t like women much,’ Guggenheim said, ‘and usually prefer to be with homosexuals if not with men. Women are so boring.’
The gallery was a commercial disaster, with only an exhibition by Tanguy (another paramour, who gifted her two painted miniatures to wear as earrings) making money. Another exhibition of 120 works by children, including Guggenheim’s son and daughter, and a young Lucian Freud, also did well. Guggenheim acquired at least one work from every show so as not to ‘disappoint’ the artists. Sometimes, if they had fragile egos, such as the Dutch painter Geer van Velde, a favourite of her beloved Beckett, she bought several under fake names. ‘The London public is apathetic to modern art,’ Guggenheim complained to a friend.
The gallery was losing £600 a year, perhaps not helped by the lavish post-opening parties Guggenheim hosted at the Café Royal. In May 1939, the year her uncle opened his Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York, Guggenheim decided to open a rival museum in London instead. She approached Herbert Read, then editor of the Burlington Magazine, to be the founding director. Having lost her father on the Titanic, Guggenheim found in Read a surrogate paternal figure (she called him ‘Papa’). As a home for her future museum, she rented Kenneth Clark’s house in Portland Place.
Guggenheim went to Paris with a shopping list drawn up by Read for their new enterprise. She also considered writing to her estranged uncle to solicit loans. However, war soon broke out and plans faltered, but the dream persisted. She used Read’s list of artists as the basis for her ‘picture a day’ buying spree in Paris, many shown to her and bought before she even got out of bed. Three years later Guggenheim founded Art of this Century, her gallery and museum in New York, and soon after the war she founded a permanent museum in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, leaving her life’s work to the Guggenheim Foundation on her death in 1979. ‘I am not an art collector,’ she said.
‘I am a museum.’
From the July/August 2026 issue of Apollo.
