The Royal Academy reassembles Guggenheim Jeune, the Cork Street gallery Peggy Guggenheim ran for eighteen months from January 1938, from 21 November 2026 to 14 March 2027.
In January 1938 Peggy Guggenheim opened a gallery on Cork Street, a few doors from the Royal Academy, and called it Guggenheim Jeune. She was thirty-nine, had money from a family she was largely estranged from, knew nothing about running a gallery, and took advice from Marcel Duchamp. She ran it for eighteen months and staged around twenty exhibitions: Kandinsky’s first solo show in Britain, the first exhibition of collage in this country, and a sculpture show that became a national scandal when customs officers refused to admit the work as art. Then she closed it, went to Paris to buy a picture a day, and ended up in Venice.
Everything she later collected started in that room. She had wanted to open a museum and was talked into a gallery instead; the eighteen months on Cork Street are where she learned the difference, and where she decided which of the two she was for.
The Royal Academy reassembles it in the Sackler Wing from Saturday 21 November 2026 to Sunday 14 March 2027, bringing back key works from those exhibitions — Agar, Dalí, Hepworth, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Moore, Kernn-Larsen and Taeuber-Arp. Tickets are £17 and Friends go free, with three preview days from 18 November. It was organised with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which is where the collecting that began on Cork Street finished.