Peggy Guggenheim in London: the birth of a collector soon to be seen in Venice – Venice – Arte.it

Venice – “I’ve been in love with Venice for fifty years. If I didn’t live here, I’d be living in the English countryside.”
These words by Peggy Guggenheim emphasize the deep love that united the visionary who revolutionized modern art with England, her true spiritual homeland.
The exhibition takes place from April 25 to October 19 in Venice Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a collector will look at the London experience of Peggy Guggenheim and her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, active between 1938 and 1939 at 30 Cork Street.
Gražina Subelytė, curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and Simon Grant, guest curator, will reconstruct a crucial chapter in the life of Peggy Guggenheim, destined to definitively mark her future role as a collector and patron of twentieth-century art, decisive in shaping the British art scene of the period between the two wars. Increasing the visibility of contemporary art at a time when London’s institutions remained conservative, Guggenheim Jeune developed an essential platform for avant-garde art that challenged established norms.
These years also saw the consolidation of Peggy Guggenheim’s identity as a patron of the arts, determined to found a museum of modern art in London, a vision that would be realized in Venice. Guggenheim Jeune had become one of the most important points of reference for the artistic avant-garde of the time, organizing more than twenty exhibitions in one year, while Peggy, among several curatorial documents, drew the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom of Vasily Kandinsky, a monographic exhibition dedicated to Jean Cocteau, and the first British exhibition entirely devoted to collage.
Gisèle Freund: Herbert Read and Peggy Guggenheim, 1939 (printed 1977) 35 x 46 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection Archive, Venice, purchase thanks to Ikona Gallery, Venice, 1988

The Venetian Route will present to the public around a hundred key works, drawn from important international institutions and private collections, exhibited on the occasion of these groundbreaking exhibitions, as well as similar works from the same period, and works by artists that Peggy Guggenheim would later collect, from Barbara Hepworth to Piet Mondrian, from Henry Moore to Cedric Morris.

The exhibition will feature a variety of languages, including sculptures, works on paper, photographs, puppets and archival materials, restoring the extraordinary diversity of an era of great cultural ferment.
Under the lens will be seen the decisive role of friendships and collaborations with key figures of modernism, from Samuel Beckett to Marcel Duchamp. There will be no shortage of key works of abstraction and surrealism exhibited during the short but intense activity of the Guggenheim Jeune, as well as the individual exhibitions organized in this space, from the portraits of Cedric Morris, a Welsh artist at the center of the British avant-garde scene, and the exhibitions of the American painter Charles Howard, from the German sculptor Heinz Henghes to the historical exhibition Abstract and concrete artwith works by artists such as Mondriaan, Taeuber-Arp and Van Doesburg.