Peggy Guggenheim opened her first gallery on Cork Street in January 1938, a short walk from the Royal Academy. Eighty-eight years on, the Academy is handing that year back to her.
The show is called Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector. It opens in the Sackler Wing at Burlington House on 21 November and runs until 14 March. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice put it together with the Academy. Bottega Veneta is among its supporters.
Cork Street
The gallery was called Guggenheim Jeune, a pun on Bernheim-Jeune, the Paris dealers. It opened at 30 Cork Street with a show of Jean Cocteau's drawings. Samuel Beckett, close to her then, had pushed her toward the art of her own time. Over the next eighteen months Guggenheim put on more than twenty exhibitions, and Marcel Duchamp helped her hang the rooms and taught her the difference between abstraction and Surrealism.
She gave Wassily Kandinsky his first solo show in Britain. She staged the first exhibition of collage the city had seen. A show of contemporary sculpture became a public argument over whether abstract work even counted as art. London in 1938 kept to figurative painting and settled taste, and Guggenheim showed the opposite a few doors from the Academy's own rooms.
The return
The gallery lost money through its short life and closed in the summer of 1939, as the war came. The Academy has now gathered works that hung at Guggenheim Jeune and others from the same years. Several come back to London for the first time since she showed them.
The list runs through Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Eileen Agar, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, Yves Tanguy and André Masson, Salvador Dalí and Rita Kernn-Larsen. Grazina Subelyte of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection curated it, with Simon Grant and the Academy's Sylvie Broussine. From London the show travels on to the Guggenheim in New York in April.
Guggenheim did not set out to be a collector. With the critic Herbert Read she drew up plans for a museum of modern art in London and raised a budget to fill it. The war closed the museum before it opened. She took the money and bought the art herself, and the collection stood in for the institution she never built.
She lost money on Cork Street. She came away with a life's work.
The Splendid EditVenice
Bottega Veneta's support reads as a Venice story. The house was founded in Vicenza in 1966 and keeps its workshops in the Veneto, and in recent years it has backed cultural institutions in the cities where it works. It has put its name behind Punta della Dogana, the Leeum in Seoul, the Bangkok Kunsthalle and the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation in Venice. Guggenheim's palazzo sits a few bridges from where the house began.
Under Louise Trotter, who leads Bottega now, the brand has leaned on heritage and material over spectacle. A patron's name in small type at the door of a museum fits that register. The link here is a city and a collector who loved it, and the house has framed its part that way.
What she built
What Guggenheim learned on Cork Street she carried to Paris, then New York. She set herself the task of buying a picture a day, backed the artists who would define mid-century modern art, and gave Jackson Pollock his first solo show. She showed the collection at the Venice Biennale in 1948, then settled it in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, where it has stayed.
The Academy is staging that beginning in the galleries nearest to where it happened, three days before Advent. For four months London gets back the year Peggy Guggenheim spent trying to change its mind.