9 Women, 20th Century
The history of twentieth‑century art is often told as a series of heroic male figures: Picasso reinventing form, Pollock dripping paint, Warhol silkscreening icons. Yet, this narrative leaves out a crucial part of the story. Women artists were not passive witnesses or marginal figures. They were central participants, shaping artistic movements, questioning established norms, and often working in ways that expanded the very definition of art. In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim made an important step toward rewriting this story with her exhibition 31 Women in New York, the first show in the United States dedicated exclusively to women artists. 9 Women, 20th Century continues in that spirit, extending the narrative into the decades that followed.
From the beginning of the century, women used art to articulate personal and social identities that traditional society preferred to keep hidden. One such voice was the writer Colette, whose celebrated literary explorations of bisexuality, desire and independence provoked scandal in her time. In painting, her portrait was captured by Elisabeth Fuss‑Armoré, an artist moving in the avant‑garde intellectual circles of Montparnasse during Les Années Folles. This intimate and delicate portrait of Colette, shown at the opening of our exhibition, sets the tone: modern art was not only about new forms but also about new freedoms.
These freedoms took many directions. For some women, Surrealism offered the perfect platform to explore identity and the unconscious. It was a movement invested in dreams and psychological exploration, and some women artists infused it with their own imagery and experience. Leonor Fini, for instance, frequently painted witches as figures embodying female power, autonomy and mystery. The work on paper included here depicts one of these witches, vanishing into the void, elusive and marked by a spellbinding gaze. Leonora Carrington, meanwhile, conjured fantastical animals, including the spectral horse shown here, created in 1940 while she was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Spain. For Carrington, the symbol of the horse represented her alter ego, vehicle for escape and transformation. Grace Pailthorpe brought yet another layer, combining her work as a surgeon and psychoanalytic researcher with Surrealist techniques to create paintings and texts aimed at revealing the workings of the unconscious.
Outside Europe, women also played a decisive role in shaping modernism. In California, Jennie Lewis produced prints and watercolors of cityscapes and architecture, such as the two views of San Francisco’s Temple Emanuel exhibited here. Her work is rooted in observation, quiet yet powerful, and shows how modern art was not limited to abstraction or Surrealism but also embraced realism with a modern sensibility. Another Californian, Louise Janin, took her explorations abroad, settling in Paris and experimenting with Symbolism, Art Deco, Musicalism and, later, her unique cosmogrammes, abstract compositions created by manipulating pigments and liquids to form unpredictable, swirling shapes.
By the mid‑century, new movements emerged. Abstract Expressionism became synonymous with large gestures and intense color, and while men like Pollock and de Kooning dominate its myth, women like Mary Abbott and Amaranth Ehrenhalt were equally engaged in its development. Abbott moved fluidly between New York and the Caribbean, using bold strokes and color to merge abstraction with the memory of place. Ehrenhalt chose Paris, working alongside expatriates like Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis, carving out her own space despite financial difficulties.
This trajectory of experimentation continued into the late twentieth century with artists like Pacita Abad, who transformed painting into a tactile experience by stitching, layering and embellishing her canvases with sequins and textiles. Her trapunto works, including the late example exhibited here, demonstrate how material and technique can themselves be revolutionary.
The nine artists brought together in this exhibition show how women across the century refused to accept the boundaries assigned to them, whether geographic, aesthetic or personal. They explored identity, experimented with materials, traveled across continents, and engaged directly with the most influential movements of their time. Their works do not just fill gaps in the story of modern art; they rewrite it.
