TWO shows on the South Downs offer a radical lens on the 1930s, a world away from Jarrow marchers and austere British modernism.

“Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo” charts the art collector’s five years living in Yew Tree Cottage, on the Hampshire-Sussex border, before returning to New York at the outbreak of the Second World War. “During this time she started to collect the art that made her name and is now in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Petersfield gave her the time and space to create her collection,” explains Louise Weller, head of exhibitions and collections at Petersfield Museum. Guggenheim had come to the Downs in 1934 to be near the communist writer Douglas Garman, and chose Yew Tree for its convenient bus route, allowing her daughter Pegeen to attend school with Garman’s daughter Debbie.

Forced to leave Switzerland in the mid-19th century, the Guggenheims established themselves in New York. Anti-Semitism stopped Peggy’s family from joining the country club, but they held Friday-night dinners at the St Regis hotel. Her maternal grandfather was president of Temple Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in Manhattan. Her father perished on the Titanic in 1912, and after his funeral service at Temple Emanu-El, Guggenheim wrote that she “became religious”. The final, revised version of her memoir Out of This Century: Confessions of an art addict, published in 1979, reinstated all the references to herself as Jewish.

As Guggenheim’s relationship with Garman deteriorated, her professional and personal interest in artists deepened. She founded Guggenheim Jeune in Cork Street in 1938, with Marcel Duchamp as adviser. In its 18 months of operation, Guggenheim Jeune’s 21 exhibitions were some of London’s most avant-garde. Jean Cocteau was the inaugural artist. Jean Arp travelled to London from Paris to help to install the Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition in spring 1938. Works by Arp, Constantin Brâncusi, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon were refused entry to Britain, as customs officers did not recognise them as duty-exempt artworks. Leading art critics protested, and entry was allowed.

© Leonora Carrington Council and rossogranadaLeonora Carrington, Woman with Fox, bronze sculpture (2010)

Arp spent a week at Yew Tree, travelling around the countryside. Guggenheim noted how Arp was enthusiastic about the tiny ancient churches. St Thomas à Becket, near Guggenheim’s former home of Warblington farmhouse, was a favourite. The extended medieval church contained the footprint of the original Saxon tower and arch, and its exterior presented a balance of forms.The steeply pitched roof of St Thomas’s created varied angular views. Arp’s sculpture To Be Lost in the Forest, two bronze anthropomorphic forms cradled in the indentations of a larger ovoid, is representative of his work at this time.

The Dadaist Yves Tanguy and Guggenheim had a brief affair the previous year. At Yew Tree Cottage, Tanguy carved a rosewood ring for Guggenheim with wood from the garden. The geometric shape of Untitled (c.1937) makes it a wearable sculpture. Tanguy’s Fraud in the Garden (1930) was slashed by a pro-Catholic mob in Paris, when it was shown besides Salvador Dalí’s anti-clerical film L’Âge d’Or. Possibly the name Dada may have its origins in incantations for Byzantine saints rather than childhood French for rocking horse. The theology student Hugo Ball may have coined the term at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, in tribute to Dionysius the Areopagite, D.A , one of the subjects of his book on Byzantine Christianity.

The Exhibition of Collages, Papier-collés and Photo-montages, held in November 1938, was the first exhibition in Britain dedicated to collage. On loan from Guggenheim Venice, Ernst’s Zoomorphic Couple (1933) portrays the artist’s fascination with birds, as a bird-like form is about to be caressed by a one-eyed figure emerging from dark depths. The Surrealist Ernst explored dreamlike and fantastic imagery. In 1942, Zoomorphic Couple was displayed in “Art of This Century”, at Guggenheim’s New York Gallery.

By 1942, the collector was married to Ernst, having rescued him in Paris, where he had been interred as an enemy alien and then as a degenerate artist. Previously, Ernst had been the partner of the Roman Catholic-raised Surrealist Leonora Carrington.

IN PETWORTH, “Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary” opens with Lee Miller’s photos of 20-year-old Carrington and 46-year-old Ernst holidaying in Cornwall in 1937, and at Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche farmhouse in the south of France in 1939, where the couple created a surrealist bas-relief of two figures, representing each other.

After two mental breakdowns, Carrington left in 1942 for Mexico City, where she lived for 60 years. Although Carrington characterised her Lancashire family’s piety as “my mother painted biscuit tin lids for church jumble sales”, religion’s influence on her work is clear. In the tonally subdued watercolour The Three Magdalenes (1988), a central white-robed figure faces the viewer, with a paler figure in profile to the left, and a spectral figure, rendered mostly in loose sketch marks, to the right. Through outline, beige wash, and overlapping hatching, the figures merge in places, presenting a three-in-one.

© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2023Max Ernst, Zoomorphic Couple (1933), oil on canvas, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)

Dating from a period living in New York, Play Shadow (1977) presents a trinity in bronze, pink, and translucent grey, with fragments of mirror writing capturing the artist’s loneliness. And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (based on a 1953 painting) (2011) show a central mythological figure with a tiny cross on its head, and an upright horned animal with cloven hoof and tail protruding from a red cloak, observed by two boys dressed in monk’s cowls, while a spirit in translucent white dances in the background.

The bronze sculpture La Vieja Magdelena (1988) references Mayan art, expressing a lined face through irregular circles and semi-circles atop a draped figure, and projects the Gospel character into an exploration of older women’s place in the world. Woman with Fox and The Palmist, from 2010, have sunray halos associated with images of Mary, rendered in bronze, and the palmist’s attenuated hands are raised as if in blessing.

The artist’s RC childhood is also evident in her designs for the Jewish writer S. An-sky’s play The Dybbuk from 1974, where the face of the central character, Janan, resembles the Shroud of Turin. In the centenary year of the Surrealist Manifesto, these two shows are reminders of the movement’s faith influences.

“Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo” is at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery, St Peter’s Road, Petersfield, Hampshire, until 5 October. Phone 01730 262601. www.petersfieldmuseum.co.uk

“Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary” is at Newlands House Gallery, Pound Street, Petworth, West Sussex, until 25 October. Phone 01798 651002. newlandshouse.gallery