Women Art Dealers

Women Art Dealers brings together fascinating case studies of galleries run by women between the 1940s and 1980s. It marks a departure from other work in the field of art markets, challenging male-dominated histories by analyzing the work of female dealers who anticipated the global model, worked to promote art across continents, and thus developed an international art market. Part 1 focuses on the women gallerists behind the promotion of modern art after World War II who participated in important research about the neo-Avant-Garde. Part 2 examines the contributions by women art dealers toward the birth of new markets – through establishing the reputation of artistic genres, such as video art and photography, and working at the forefront of advancing contemporary art. Finally, Part 3 analyzes case studies from the southern European art scene, paying fresh attention to several under-researched markets in the region like Italy and Portugal. Each chapter study provides a historiographic profile of the gallery under discussion and critical analysis is supported with a wide range of visual material including portraits of the women art dealers, photographs of the exhibitions they managed, and printed documentation like catalogues, invitations, and posters that were often used to support artists on display in experimental ways.

Women, Art and Money in England establishes the importance of women artists' commercial dealings to their professional identities and reputations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grounded in economic, social and art history, the book draws on and synthesises data from a broad range of documentary and archival sources to present a comprehensive history of women artists' professional status and business relationships within the complex and changing art market of late-Victorian England. By providing new insights into the routines and incomes of women artists, and the spaces where they created, exhibited and sold their art, this book challenges established ideas about what women had to do to be considered 'professional' artists. More important than a Royal Academy education or membership to exhibiting societies was a woman's ability to sell her work. This meant that women had strong incentive to paint in saleable, popular and 'middlebrow' genres, which reinforced prejudices towards women's 'naturally' inferior artistic ability – prejudices that continued far into the twentieth century. From shining a light on the difficult to trace pecuniary arrangements of little researched artists like Ethel Mortlock to offering new and direct comparisons between the incomes earned by male and female artists, and the genres, commissions and exhibitions that earned women the most money, Women, Art and Money is a timely contribution to the history of women's working lives that is relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines.

In this remarkable portrait-survey of 36 of Toronto’s most distinctive and influential art dealers, artist Viktor Mitic has captured and illuminated the unique individual personalities of his subjects. Depicting by turns their passion, insouciance, vivacity, shrewdness, eccentricity, and geniality, these portraits successfully reflect the rainbow of human emotion and expression. This collection of paintings turns the tables on the behind-the-scenes figures of the Canadian art world, and serves both as a keepsake of the corresponding exhibit that was held in the Odon Wagner Gallery in 2009 and as an widely-appealing visual study of men and women as their everyday selves by an internationally-accomplished artist.

"In response to the poor representation of women in art galleries and museums, Philadelphia-based collector Linda Lee Alter decided in the 1980s to focus on art by women. The result, now at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is an extraordinarily diverse and powerful collection of nearly 500 objects by some of the most influential female artists of the past 50 years. Emphasizing contemporary living artists, but including major works by Louise Bourgeois, Elizabeth Catlett, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and others, Alter formed her collection with the intent of giving it to a public institution in order to make women artists more visible. This gorgeously illustrated volume celebrates the collection and its legacy by bringing together leading scholars of feminism, and modern and contemporary art to discuss how the artists in Alter's collection saw and transformed the world. Among the essays are discussions of the impact of feminism in Chicago, Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay area; self-portraiture by women in the 1970s and 1980s; the legacy of Elizabeth Catlett on younger African American artists; collaborative practice among women; an interview with Linda Lee Alter; and an appreciation by artist Diane Burko." -- Publisher's description.