Peggy Guggenheim began to exhibit her celebrated art collection to the public as early as 1951, but initially only on a seasonal basis.  It wasn’t until after she died in 1979 that her home in Venice, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, was opened full-time to visitors.  I hadn’t realized until very recently that she had tried on previous occasions to open galleries but with limited success.  A small exhibition currently in London at Ordovas tells the story of a gallery she opened in Cork Street, Guggenheim Jeune, in 1938.  The venture survived only eighteen months, closing in December 1939.  It’s easy enough to understand the reasons why it failed.  Art lovers in London had more pressing concerns in those early days of the war. It’s also possible that the artists that Guggenheim patronized and promoted in those days were simply too radical for the collectors of the time.  Cocteau, Brancusi, Calder, Schwitters and the like must have seemed shockingly avant-garde in the late 1930s.

The Ordovas exhibition in London displays some of the Guggenheim Jeune catalogs from the period alongside a small number of paintings and sculptures by two artists loved and exhibited by Peggy Guggenheim in those early days, Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy.  I’m no great admirer of either, but even eighty years on it’s hard not to be impressed by Guggenheim’s vision and courage.  She wasn’t daunted by the failure of the London gallery. She decamped first to Paris and then to the south of France, buying vast quantities of contemporary art with her inheritance.  Her purchases, works by Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Klee, Magritte and other modern masters, became the core of the collection that eventually opened decades later in Venice and the permanent monument to an extraordinary collector and patron.