Peggy Guggenheim Collected Pollock, Picasso and Dalí. So Why Wasn’t She Interested in Warhol?

As the Royal Academy prepares to revisit the making of one of the 20th century’s most influential collectors, one artist she reportedly turned away raises an interesting question: what does it really mean to have a great eye for art?

Peggy Guggenheim had an extraordinary ability to recognise artists who would go on to shape modern art.

Her collection brought together Picasso, Dalí, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Magritte. Most famously, she backed Jackson Pollock before his position in post-war American art was secure, giving him his first solo exhibition in 1943, supporting him financially and commissioning Mural.

And yet, when Andy Warhol reportedly contacted her in Venice hoping to visit her collection, she refused to let him in. It is a small anecdote in an extraordinary collecting career, but with hindsight, a fascinating one.

Guggenheim’s serious involvement with contemporary art began in London in 1938, when, aged 39, she opened Guggenheim Jeune on Cork Street.

Marcel Duchamp helped introduce her to artists and the ideas surrounding abstraction and Surrealism, while Samuel Beckett encouraged her interest in contemporary art. The gallery existed for just 18 months, but staged more than 20 exhibitions, including Kandinsky’s first solo exhibition in London.

It was here that Guggenheim began developing the eye that would shape her collection. As Europe moved towards war, her collecting accelerated. She acquired works by artists including Dalí, Mondrian, Braque and Picabia before moving to New York and opening Art of This Century in 1942.

Among the younger artists she supported there was Jackson Pollock. In 1943, Guggenheim gave Pollock his first solo exhibition and provided him with financial support. She promoted and sold his paintings and commissioned the enormous Mural, which would become an important work in the development of his practice.

Guggenheim wasn’t simply buying artists whose importance had already been established. She was often making decisions while reputations were still being formed. Which makes the Warhol story all the more interesting.

There isn’t a definitive explanation from Guggenheim herself setting out why she wasn’t interested in Warhol. But importantly, he doesn’t appear to have been an isolated case.

Lisa Immordino Vreeland, director of Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (a 2015 documentary exploring Guggenheim’s life and influence as a collector), has described Guggenheim as resistant to the generation that followed the artists she had championed, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

By the time Warhol emerged in the 1960s, Guggenheim’s collecting identity had already been shaped over several decades by Cubism, Surrealism, abstraction and the American avant-garde. Pop Art represented something different. Warhol’s use of advertising, consumer products, celebrity and mechanical reproduction challenged ideas about what serious art could look like, and it was a direction Guggenheim appears never to have embraced.

So perhaps the more interesting question isn’t whether Guggenheim simply missed Warhol, but why a collector who had been so open to radical new ideas earlier in her career was less receptive to the generation that followed. Her eye had been formed within particular movements, relationships and moments in art history. The same conviction that allowed her to champion artists such as Pollock before their importance was widely recognised, also meant developing a clear sense of what she believed in and, inevitably, what she didn’t.

Collecting with hindsight is very different from collecting while an artist’s reputation is still developing. Guggenheim made decisions based on curiosity, relationships and conviction, sometimes long before the market or institutions had provided confirmation. She supported artists financially, gave them exhibitions and created opportunities for their work to be seen.

But conviction also means saying no. A collector with a genuine point of view will inevitably overlook artists who later become important. In some ways, those omissions can tell us as much about a collection as the names it contains.

That remains relevant today. Markets change, institutional attention develops and successive generations reassess artists and movements. Trying to anticipate all of that is very different from building a collection around works you understand, believe in and genuinely want to live with.

The strongest collections often have a sense of identity, where you can see the collector in the choices.

That makes the Royal Academy’s forthcoming exhibition particularly interesting. Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector opens at the Royal Academy of Arts on 21 November 2026, following its presentation at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Rather than beginning with the famous collection we know today, the exhibition returns to Guggenheim Jeune and those formative 18 months in London, bringing together works and archival material connected with the artists and exhibitions that helped shape her development as a collector.

Nearly 90 years after Guggenheim opened her London gallery, the exhibition asks us to look not simply at what she collected, but at how her eye was formed in the first place. And perhaps the Warhol story makes that history even more interesting.

Because the making of a great collector isn’t necessarily a story of always being right. It is about developing an eye, forming convictions and making decisions before history has provided the answer. Guggenheim didn’t predict every direction modern art would take. But she did build a collection with a clear identity, one that we are still interested in almost 90 years later.