Peggy Guggenheim in London

Peggy Guggenheim in London opens at the Royal Academy on 21 November 2026, running through to 14 March 2027. It's a collaboration between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the RA, and it brings together more than 80 works from her collection to trace her early years in the city.

There's a good bit of local history to it. In the late 1930s, Guggenheim opened 'Guggenheim Jeune' at 30 Cork Street in Mayfair, just around the corner from the Royal Academy. At the time, it sat right up against the conservative tastes of the British art establishment, and it quickly became a radical voice for progress, championing Surrealism and abstraction. Over the following eighteen months, the gallery staged more than twenty exhibitions, including the first UK solo show by Vasily Kandinsky, the first exhibition of collage in Britain, and a contemporary sculpture show that became a national scandal. That period made her the collector she's known as today, and this exhibition gathers the work to show how that gallery helped shape the London art scene.

The 80-plus works span painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, print and photography, with names like Eileen Agar, Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Henry Moore, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Cedric Morris and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. It's a broad sweep of the artists she was bringing to the city back then, and seeing them together in one place gives a proper sense of the range she was working with.

It's held in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at Burlington House. Tickets are £17, and Friends of the RA go free. Opening hours are Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday from 10am to 6pm, and Friday and Saturday from 10am to 9pm, so there are plenty of late-night slots if you're coming from work. Friends of the RA can preview the show on 18, 19 and 20 November, a few days before it opens to everyone else.