Incollect Magazine - Issue 9

72 www.incollect.com Debra Force Debra Force Fine Art, New York Debra Force has been in the historical American art field for 45 years, working at Christie’s auction house as a corporate curator and then at Hirschl & Adler Galleries in New York City before starting her own gallery. “There were more women in the contemporary field than traditional ones, so early on it was a struggle,” she says. “I found that with perseverance and showing that I was knowledgeable, I could establish credibility. That’s how you build up your reputation.” Virginia Zabriskie, Joan Washburn, and Barbara Mathes are among other women dealers who Force counts as mentors. “I started my gallery in 1999, focusing on my love for and knowledge of traditional American art,” says Force. “Since I have always been interested in various periods of this field, I chose not to specialize in any one area, but instead to feature quality works from the late 18th to the 19th century — landscapes, genre, and still life subjects in artistic styles ranging from Impressionism, Modernism, Social Commentary and Regionalism to 20th-century Abstraction and Realism.” Twenty- five years later Force has built a resume that includes sales of major paintings to museums nationwide as well as the development of many important private collections. “We handle work from the 18th century up to about 1970 or so, but I would say that our focus these days is mostly the late-19th and early and mid-20th century given changing market tastes.” That said, she says, adding with a short laugh, “we just sold an amazing 18th-century portrait by James Peal for seven figures. That was a huge highlight for me.” 1938, to promote the ideas of European modernist painters in England and “made a habit of purchasing at least one artwork f rom each of her own exhibit ions,” according to art historian Simon Dickinson. Her bold inaugural exhibition presented drawings by Jean Cocteau that aroused the ire of British censors. She gave Wassily Kandinsky his first solo London show and showed works by Henr y Moore, Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Yves Tanguy, and Alexander Calder. Though an American, Guggenheim focused on European art and artists for the most part, both as a dealer and art collector. She also never treated art dealing as a business, but was more interested in the creative, intellectua l, and socia l opportunities the art world offered. She differed in this regard from one of her more entrepreneurial predecessors, Edith Halpert (Edith Gregoryevna Fivoosiovitch) who was born in Ukraine and emigrated to New York following the 1905 pogroms, where she later took classes at the Art Students League. Societal norms in the 1920s provided little opportunity for women wanting to be artists so she went off to work at the S. W. Straus & Company investment bank to support her artist husband Samuel Halpert. She eventually saved enough money to open the Downtown Gallery on West 13th Street in bohemian Greenwich Village in 1926. Halpert ran her gallery to make money, modeling herself on the successful Parisian art dealer Ambrose Vollard. The New York galleries of the time were still focused on European art, so Halpert seized the daring opportunity to promote the work of living American artists. Over the next four decades, she showed Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and many others, as well as artists of Asian and African descent i nc lud i ng J a c ob L aw r enc e , Ya s uo Kuniyoshi, and Horace Pippin. In 1941, in collaboration with the critic Alain Locke, she organized American Negro Art, noted as “the first commercial exhibition of works by African American artists in New York