The Royal Academy reassembles Guggenheim Jeune, the Cork Street gallery where Peggy Guggenheim's eye as a collector first took shape in 1938.
The Royal Academy of Arts in Mayfair reassembles Guggenheim Jeune, the Cork Street gallery where Peggy Guggenheim began as a collector, in the Sackler Wing from Saturday 21 November 2026.
Guggenheim opened the gallery in January 1938, a few doors from the Royal Academy. She was 39, had money from a family she was largely estranged from, and took advice from Marcel Duchamp.
She ran it for 18 months and staged around 20 exhibitions. They included Kandinsky’s first solo show in Britain and the first exhibition of collage in this country. A sculpture show became a national scandal when customs officers refused to admit the work as art.
She had wanted to open a museum and was talked into a gallery instead. After closing it she went to Paris to buy a picture a day, and everything she later collected started in that room.
The Academy brings back works from those exhibitions by Agar, Dalí, Hepworth, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Moore, Kernn-Larsen and Taeuber-Arp. The show runs until Sunday 14 March 2027.
It was organised with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where the collecting that began on Cork Street finished.