Guggenheim Jeune

In January 1938 the American collector Peggy Guggenheim opened her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in a former pawnbroker’s shop on the second floor of 30 Cork Street, just behind the Royal Academy. Run with her friend Wyn Henderson, it lasted only eighteen months, but in that time it staged around twenty exhibitions that brought the European avant-garde to the fore. The programme opened with drawings by Jean Cocteau and went on to include Kandinsky’s first solo show in England, Yves Tanguy, and work by emerging British artists.

Henghes’s exhibition of sculpture was one of the gallery’s final shows. Guggenheim Jeune closed in June 1939. Peggy Guggenheim’s ambition then turned to founding a museum of modern art, and the war carried that ambition first to Paris, then to her Art of This Century gallery in New York, and finally to Venice. The Cork Street gallery was where she learned to be a collector, and the artists she showed there, Henghes among them, are part of that story.