Showing women artists

Press, 23 April 1987, Page 20

Showing women artists

The segregated customs that have dogged women painters — such as their restricted subject matter and their exclusion, until this century, from life classes — do not explain their comparative neglect by art historians, galleries and auctioneers.

That, at any rate, is the belief of Mrs Wilhelmina (Billie) Holladay, the wife of a Washington property developer. She has set about putting matters to rights with her new National Museum of Women in the Arts, housed in a grand former Masonic Temple in downtown Washington, which opened this month with a travel-

ling exhibition of American woman painters from 1830 to 1930.

Some years ago Mrs Holladay and her husband, collecting paintings in Europe, were struck by Clara Peeter, an early seven-teenth-century Flemish painter. Returning home, they tried to find out more about her. They then discovered that the standard art-history texts made no mention of Peeter — or indeed of any other woman painter. There and then, they decided to concentrate on collecting the works of women artists. Their 500 or so works of art, from the

Renaissance to the present day, form the nucleus of the new museum’s permanent collection.

The museum has its feminist critics. It will create a ghetto of women painters, some fear; the exhibits lack political content, say others.

■ A woman, wrote Virginia Woolf, needs money and a room of her own. Mrs Holladay has provided a beautiful room and, being a dab hand at fundraising, lots of money. She has also, she hopes, got art dealers and museum curators thinking. Copyright—The Economist