In 2024, art collector Christian Levett opened Europe’s first museum dedicated to women artists in a little town in the south of France. But for those of us who can’t make the trip to the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, or FAMM), the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) has arranged the next best thing: a blockbuster touring exhibition about women artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement, featuring some of the highlights of the FAMM collection.
“A lot of these are tremendously important pictures, and the wider public should be able to see them,” Levett said. “It’s the best way right now in the U.S. of seeing the whole gamut of the major female painters of 1950s New York, all in the one space, all in one show.”
Katharine Wright curator at the American Federation of Arts; Pauline Forlenza, director and CEO of the American Federation of Arts; collector Christian Levett; and art historian Ellen Landau. Photo courtesy of the American Federation of the Arts.
“Abstract Expressionists: The Women” is currently on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Featuring close to 50 works by 32 artists, ranging from the late 1930s to 1977, the exhibition showcases the full arc of the Abstract Expressionist movement. It makes the case that women played a pivotal role in this influential period of art history, working alongside their more celebrated male peers, and just as creative and groundbreaking.
The show includes artists whose stars have been in ascendancy in recent years, such as Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner—but also artists you might not associate with Abstract Expressionism, such as Miriam Schapiro and Audrey Flack, who went on to become better known for their contributions to the Pattern and Decoration and Realism movements, respectively. Other names are still relatively obscure, like West Coast painters Ruth Armer and Emiko Nakano.
Rediscovering the Women Who Were There All Along
For decades, women’s contributions to Abstract Expressionism, the leading art movement of the 20th century, were overlooked. That has started to change over the last decade, stemming in part from the 2016 “Women of Abstract Expressionism” exhibition at the Denver Art Museum and the bestselling 2018 Mary Gabriel book Ninth Street Women.
“Abstract Expressionists: The Women” on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia.
Levett saw the Denver show, and it completely changed the course of his collecting. He had already been transitioning from classical art to works from the postwar period, but was quickly finding that it would be cost-prohibitive to put together a comprehensive collection with male superstars like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
“Very honestly, there’s not a lot left for collectors to buy of the male Abstract Expressionists,” Ellen Landau, an expert on Pollock and Krasner who curated the show, said. “The important ones are in museums or in major collections.”
With the Denver exhibition catalogue as his guide, Levett began researching their female counterparts, quickly coming to believe that they were criminally underappreciated.
“I was discovering pictures that had Betty Parsons labels on the back that had been shown at the Guggenheim in the ’60s, at MoMA or SFMoMA in the ’40s or ’50s. It was just extraordinary,” Levett said. “I just thought, ‘well, there’s a world-class museum-quality collection on the market here.’”
Emiko Nakano, (1957). Photo by Fraser Marr, courtesy of the Levett Collection and FAMM.
He began snapping up overlooked masterpieces by the likes of Yvonne Thomas, Sonia Gechtoff, Deborah Remington, and Ethel Schwabacher. These were works priced in the tens or hundreds of thousands, compared to the $10 million or more he could expect to pay for works with a similar pedigree by men of the era.
The more Levett immersed himself in the work, the more he began to believe in it. He decided to close his private museum, the Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins (Mougins Museum of Classical Art), sell off the collection, and reopen as FAMM.
“We’re trying to educate people as to who we believe the great female artists of the 20th century are,” he said, calling out specific works that he feels are especially due for renewed appreciation, like (1959) by Pat Passlof.
Pat Passlof, (1959). Photo by Fraser Marr, ©the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, courtesy of Eric Firestone Gallery, the Levett Collection, and FAMM.
“She studied under Willem de Kooning at [North Carolina’s] Black Mountain College in the 1940s and then went on to show heavily in the 1950s in New York at the major galleries,” Levett added. “This is a particularly beautiful painting by her.”
A Nationwide Tour
The AFA exhibition actually grew out of a book of the same name from Merrill Publishing, one in a series of three about Levett’s extensive holdings of women artists. It was the publisher, Hugh Merrill, who made the connection to AFA president Pauline Forlenza. Landau, who had written an essay for the book, agreed to come on board as curator of what would become a six-city show crisscrossing the U.S.
“This exhibition is a major milestone in getting these women the attention that they deserve,” Landau said. “They weren’t just copyists. They were ambitious practitioners and innovators, all on their own.”
Landau worked on the original book during pandemic lockdown, without getting to see the collection in person—something she was eager to rectify moving into the next stage of the project.
“Abstract Expressionists: The Women” on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia.
“Needless to say, I was completely blown away when I saw the real works,” she said. “These women, they definitely had their own take on what Abstract Expressionism was about.”
“The male painters, they were either color-field or they were gestural. Helen Frankenthaler was able to combine the two in a way that was very, very innovative,” Landau added. “Joan Mitchell became very disenchanted with the kind of aggressive virility of the New York gestural painters, and she added a great deal of sensuosity into her works that was missing somewhat from the male examples.”
Telling the Story
Landau lets each of the women in the show speak for themselves—both with their works, and with wall text that includes quotes from the artists.
Mercedes Matter, (1936). Photo by Fraser Marr, courtesy of Mark Borghi, the Levett Collection, and FAMM.
The curator organized the show geographically, starting with the women artists of the vaunted New York School such as Krasner, Perle Fine, and Mercedes Matter. And then there was Abstract Expressionism’s West Coast branch, with the likes of Bernice Bing and Claire Falkenstein.
But what really stuck out to Landau was the women who moved to Paris, creating a transcontinental exchange of ideas and creativity led by artists including Mitchell, Janice Biala, and Amaranth Ehrenhalt. This key moment in the history of art dovetailed nicely with the story of the FAMM collection.
“I realized that despite the fact that they were major American works, these works were going to reside for the rest of their lives in Europe,” Landau said. “That helped me to situate the story.”
Joan Mitchell, (1977). Photo by Fraser Marr, ©Estate of Joan Mitchell, courtesy of the Levett Collection and FAMM.
It’s a story that has been resonating with viewers. At the exhibition’s first venue, the Wichita Art Museum, staff had to install a table with tissues in the galleries.
“They realized they needed to do that because so many female visitors were crying, because they never thought that women artists could do such amazing work!” Landau said. “I think this show makes it very clear that Abstract Expressionism is more than just a boys’ club.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
