For the first time, an exhibition and catalogue dedicated to Peggy Guggenheim’s London experience and her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, which in just eighteen months, from January 1938 to June 1939, became a point of reference for the European avant-garde, staging more than twenty-one exhibitions and distinguishing itself by promoting local and international artists linked to abstraction and Surrealism. These included a monograph on Jean Cocteau, the first British collage group exhibition, and a controversial exhibition of contemporary sculpture.
In a context marked by extraordinary creative vitality and growing historical tensions, the company anticipated developments destined to profoundly impact twentieth-century art. “Despite its short life, the gallery plays an essential role in shaping the country’s cultural context in the years leading up to the Second World War” by presenting itself as a “radical alternative” to institutional conservatism. Gražina Subelytė and Simon Grant, curators of the project, highlight the revolutionary and philanthropic aspects of Guggenheim Jeune, whose success “measured by a courageous curatorial vision and the support offered to cutting-edge experimentation”.

A decisive phase in Peggy Guggenheim’s education is thus reviewed in detail, through 16 contributions that reconstruct the network of relationships and influences that guided her vision as a collector and patron –from Marcel Duchamp to Mary Reynolds to Samuel Beckett–, analyzing in filigree the brief parable of a project that helped shake the paradigms of contemporary British art. At the same time, its curatorial journey is investigated, which unfolds through stages ranging from the bold abstraction of Vasily Kandinsky’s first London solo exhibition, to the “portrait dolls” of Marie Vassilieff, from the material distortion of Cedric Morris’s portraits to the “exhibitions that were not” and the influence that this first pioneering artistic venture had on British public collections in the post-war context.
The initial steps of a common thread linking the London experiment to the five-year New York experiment, Art of This Century, and finally of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, are outlined.

The catalogue features an extensive iconographic apparatus that brings together key works presented on those occasions, alongside contemporary works by artists such as Eileen Agar, Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Henry Moore, Piet Mondrian, Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The volume is enriched by archival materials that convey the climate of intense experimentation within which the gallery business was inserted, as well as by apparatus that summarize the chronology of the works presented in the exhibition as well as the history of the Guggenheim Jaune.