New exhibition will unveil East Hampshire’s link to the great Guggenheim art dynasty

The Guggenheim name is synonymous with the great cities of New York, Bilbao and Venice, but less so with an historic market town in East Hampshire. An exhibition opening in the summer of 2024 is aiming to change that.

Before buying the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and the garden behind it in Venice in 1949, for five years between 1934 and 1939, world-famous 20th-century patron and collector of modern art Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) lived at Yew Tree Cottage near Petersfield.

Featuring a focused selection of artworks once owned by the self-described ‘art addict’, a new exhibition Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo will show together paintings and sculptures by leading British and European modern artists including Henry Moore (1898-1986), Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), Max Ernst (1891-1976), Jean Arp (1886-1966) and John Tunnard (1900-1971) among others.

A variety of photographs, contemporary fashion items and literature will give further context to the fascinating life and times of Peggy Guggenheim. And the exhibition will include loans from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice – whose director, Karole PB Vail, is Peggy Guggenheim’s elder granddaughter.

Running from June 15 to October 5 at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery in St Peter’s Road, the exhibition aims to explore the multitude of literary, artistic, and intellectual figures of the period with whom Guggenheim interacted and reveal the fascinating untold story of her life in the town and neighbouring West Sussex through her family, friends and lovers.

Peggy Guggenheim inherited her share of the family fortune seven years after her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, died during the Titanic’s doomed maiden voyage from England to the United States in 1912. On her 21st birthday, she became financially independent.

However, in defiance of the conventions and traditions of her upbringing, in 1920 she was a clerk at the modern bookshop in New York, The Sunwise Turn. Here, she encountered avant-garde writers and artists, including Laurence Vail (1891-1968) whom she married and had two children, Sindbad and Pegeen.

Before long though, Guggenheim arrived in Paris and soon found herself at the heart of the city’s bohème and American expatriate society.

By the summer of 1934, she had relocated, this time with her current partner Douglas Garman (1903-1969), and was renting Warblington Castle, near Langstone, in Hampshire. Soon after, Guggenheim bought Yew Tree Cottage, situated on the road between South Harting and Petersfield, and put it in Douglas’ name.

Initially, Guggenheim lived there with Pegeen, while Sindbad lived with her ex-husband Laurence Vail in Austria. But Garman soon moved in with his daughter Debbie.

Debbie, her cousin, Kitty Garman (1926-2011) and Pegeen all attended the local Winton House Preparatory School on Petersfield High Street. In the spring of 1935, Sindbad returned to England and between 1936 and 1939 he boarded at Bedales School in Steep, near Petersfield.

Far from her glamorous life as an heiress and art collector, Guggenheim noted that everyday life in Yew Tree Cottage involved such day-to-day things as draughty rooms, water pumps, cooking and trips into Petersfield.

A selection of paintings by Flora Twort (1893-1985) of Petersfield and Langstone will complement the exhibition and give a sense of the places and scenes that would have been familiar to Guggenheim at this time.

During this period, Yew Tree Cottage was host to Yves Tanguy, who carved a ring for Guggenheim from rosewood grown in the garden. It will be on display in the exhibition, kindly on loan from The Penrose Collection.

From June 2024, some of the treasures held in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are travelling to Britain, representing a rare opportunity to see them outside of ‘La Serenissima’.

As Louise Weller, head of collections and exhibitions at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery, explains: “This will not be a standard art exhibition, as it is a unique opportunity to use the multi-disciplinary character of Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery; combining artwork, photography, fashion and literature, to tell an often overlooked part of Peggy Guggenheim’s extraordinary life.”