How London made Peggy Guggenheim one of the world's great artistic patrons

After Peggy Guggenheim’s relationship with publisher Douglas Garman unravelled, her friend Peggy Waldman suggested she take up ‘serious work — the art gallery, book agency — anything that would be engrossing yet impersonal’. Publishing didn’t appeal, so a gallery it would be. ‘Little did I dream of the thousands of dollars I was about to sink into art,’ Guggenheim wrote in her memoirs.

Inspired by the 1937 Paris Exposition and the people she met there, she decided to open Guggenheim Jeune and bring to London the latest in Surrealism and abstract art.

The gallery opened in January 1938, at No 30, Cork Street, W1, with, as its chief adviser, Marcel Duchamp, whom Guggenheim had met in the 1920s and whom she credited for expanding her artistic knowledge: ‘At that time, I couldn’t distinguish one thing in art from another. Marcel tried to educate me. I don’t know what I would have done without him.’

The venture was short-lived, but hugely influential. Staging more than 20 exhibitions of artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Jean Cocteau, it shook up what had until then been a very conservative British art scene.

Just how avant-garde Guggenheim Jeune was emerges clearly from a 1938 fracas. The gallery was to have a sculpture show, but several pieces coming from abroad, including some by Constantin Brâncuși and Alexander Calder, were held at customs.

Only works of art were exempt from eye-watering import duties, so the authorities called upon their adviser, Tate, for an opinion — and the museum’s director, J. B. Manson, refused to recognise the abstract sculptures as art. Instead, they were classified as manufactured goods or raw materials, and charged accordingly. Guggenheim, enraged, fought the decision and won — earning abstract art proper recognition in Britain.

Guggenheim Jeune closed in June 1939, with its founder hatching plans for a museum of modern art. However, the winds of the Second World War began to whistle and Guggenheim, who had moved to Paris to secure works for her new venture, abandoned it, finally leaving Europe for the USA in 1941.

Now, the Royal Academy celebrates her London days, which sowed the seeds of her passion for collecting, with an exhibition. Reminiscent of Guggenheim Jeune’s most groundbreaking shows, it features works by Kandinsky, Salvador Dalí and Henry Moore, among others.

‘Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector’ is at the RA, London W1, from November 21–March 14, 2027

This feature originally appeared in the November 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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