Director's Letter Fall 2014

One of the common criticisms directed at many art museums is that their holdings are gender imbalanced. The artists collaborative known as the Guerilla Girls has made this one of its central concerns, citing the fact that only 4% of the artists on display at the Museum of Modern Art are women, while pointing out that many of New York’s most eminent galleries have rarely shown the work of women artists or artists of color. Often with great wit, they remind us of the slow-to-change values of both large cultural institutions and the marketplace. For example, a work from 1989 notes that among the advantages of being a woman artist are “Working without the pressure of success” and “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty.” 

The current exhibition Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds seems in some respects to confirm this observation. Born in 1931 (and thus now in her eighties), Bontecou was emerging as one of the most important artists of the 1950s and 1960s when she left New York and gave up being exhibited at Leo Castelli’s gallery, motivated at least in part by a growing distaste for the boys’ club of the New York art world. She moved to rural Pennsylvania and devoted herself to creating works of art that have been aptly described as “fierce.” After decades of obscurity she was brought back into the spotlight with a major retrospective organized in 2003.

Seen alongside Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell, Bontecou’s drawings are clear evidence of her power as an artist—and of the hard-won freedom she found for herself, even at the cost of commercial success. The artists included in Rothko to Richter show something of the gender imbalance identified by the Guerrilla Girls: only two are women—Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell—a reflection of the male-dominated New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. 

What I’ll refer to here as the 4% rule is hard to break for an encyclopedic art museum like the Princeton University Art Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where the rule is evidently 3%). The historical record is simply too dominated by the work of men for this imbalance to be remedied—but the voices and talents of women can be made present. When we sought to add a so-called Grand Manner portrait to our collections a few years ago, we were thrilled to be able to do so with a work by the eighteenth-century artist Angelica Kauffmann. The fact that our acquisition is probably her masterpiece in portraiture made the decision a fairly simple one—but we could just as easily never have even had the opportunity. With so few women of the age able to work as professional artists—Kauffmann and her French peer Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun are the first two to come to mind—such works rarely come onto the market. 

In the modern and contemporary arena there are far more opportunities, but it is still shocking to discover how poorly represented women artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been in our holdings—until recently. Kelly Baum, the Museum’s Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, has made it among her highest priorities to ensure that women have a prominent place in our collections. Given that the work of women artists remains generally undervalued relative to the work of their male peers, we have been able to make a number of significant purchases—focusing on work by women who only now are being taken up by the market, before their rising prices put them out of reach. Thus in 2011, we purchased two important works by Hannah Wilke (1940–1993), an artist who gained notoriety in the 1960s with her terracotta sculptures that have clear relationships with the women’s liberation movement of the time. More recently, we acquired major works by Michelle Stuart (born 1938), Lynda Benglis (born 1941), and Jennifer Bartlett (born 1941), assuring that pivotal works from an essential generation of women artists will be available to our students.

Every so often we can amend the more distant historical record a bit too. Two years ago a family of Princeton collectors donated three paintings by the German Expressionist painter Gabriele Münter (1877–1962). Often better known for her friendships with male artists than for her own achievement, Münter was at the forefront of the avant-garde in Munich, cofounding the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in 1911 with Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Thanks to this and earlier gifts from the same family, we now have one of the most extensive collections of Münter’s work of any U.S. museum. Seen in our galleries in the company of another recent acquisition—the complete works of the Guerrilla Girls, 1985 to 2012—such works tell at least part of a story that must be told.

James Christen Steward
Director