Incollect Magazine - Issue 9

70 www.incollect.com omen art dealers are now at the cutting edge of the art world. But they have long been an integral part of the American art scene, especially in New York, where art galleries run by women have played a role in the creation and development of the art market since at least the 1920s. Art history has been slow to recognize their contributions, though a slew of new books, exhibitions, and articles have done much to publicize pioneering women dealers. Breaking New Ground Among the most influential, successful, and prominent pioneering 20th-century women art dealers were Peggy Guggenheim, Edith Halpert, Berthe Weill, Gertrude Stein, Simone Kahn, and Betty Parsons. Following in their footsteps, in the United States and abroad, were Ileana Sonnabend, Martha Jackson, Agnes Widlund, Linda Givon, Paula Cooper, Lia Rumma, Holly Solomon, Pat Hearn, Barbara Gladstone, Marian Goodman, Victoria Miro, Mary Boone, Krystyna Gmurzynska, Joan Washburn, and June Kelly, among many others. Women art dealers sought to pioneer the use of gallery spaces and exhibition formats out of the mainstream, perhaps most famously Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. Part of the gallery, which spanned most of the floor of a midtown Manhattan office building, showcased the extraordinary collection of modern art she had amassed in Europe and made it a meeting place for young American avant-garde artists including Jackson Pollock and the emerging New York School of abstract painters, who she championed. Radical for the time, Guggenheim also staged exhibitions of many female artists including Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Leonora Carrington, Louise Nevelson, Meret Oppenheim, Kay Sage, and Dorothea Tanning. Guggenheim was something of an anomaly in the history of women art dealers. Her wealth gave her enormous freedom, especially for a woman of her era. A lifelong collector and patron, she was born into a wealthy family, the niece of mining magnate Solomon R. Guggenheim who later established the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her father was also a scion of the Guggenheim family fortune; he died on the Titanic and left her a substantial inheritance, the equivalent of over $43 million today. She opened her first modern art gallery Guggenheim Jeune, in London in January WOMEN ART DEALERS ON THE RISE by Benjamin Genocchio W