In good company
Exhibit unearths works of female artists from underground storage
The Phoenix Art Museum has 19,000 artworks in its permanent collection, but among its most valuable possessions is one of Frida Kahlo’s most famous and controversial paintings, 1938’s “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.” Donated anonymously to the museum in 1960, the painting is back on display — as well as a Georgia O’Keeffe and a Mary Cassatt — as part of “In the Company of Women,” an exhibition drawn from the permanent collection and inspired in part by the activism by women in the wake of the 2017 Women’s March and the #MeToo movement. However, says show curator Rachel Sadvary Zebro, “This is not a feminist exhibition. “A lot of these artists would not necessarily identify as being feminist artists, so that is not what the exhibition is about. This is more of a survey exhibition putting these works in a new context.”
“So we have a lot of our iconic pieces on view in this exhibition,” Zebro continues, “but never have they been seen together with their contemporaries, in the same context, in the same gallery space.”
Zebro, curatorial associate for modern and contemporary art, chose 50 works to come out of the museum’s underground, temperature-controlled storage facilities for the exhibition, which opened June 7. Other than Cassatt’s 1898 “Portrait of Master Hammond,” the art all comes from the 20th or 21st century and represents the breadth of the museum’s collection, from abstract sculpture to fashion design.
“I had a lot of help” from senior curators, Zebro says.
“My first checklist of this exhibition was enormous. I think it was 2,000 objects.”
Among those objects were five by Cassatt, perhaps the most famous American Impressionist (of either sex). Zebro chose “Master Hammond,” a pastel drawing on paper (not in the expected Impressionist style), which was donated in 1964 by Texas philanthropists Donald and Sybil Harrington. The O’Keeffe she picked, 1929’s “Pink Abstraction,” is also one of five in the collection. Donated in 1967, it is — spoiler alert! — a flower painting.
The museum had opened less than a decade earlier, so both of these gifts were meant to give a boost to a young institution in an up-and-coming metropolis. And that goes double for the Kahlo, which came to Phoenix in 1960, mere months after the official opening in November 1959.
Later acquisitions on display this summer include couture by designers Miuccia Prada and Vivienne Tam, portraits by San Francisco photographer Erica Deeman, and a quilt by Harlem artist Faith Ringgold. And some of it is definitely feminist, regardless of whether the show is or not.
Take “Seer Bonnets: A Continuing Offense” (2009), part of a series by Phoenix-based artist Angela Ellsworth that comments on the Mormon church’s history of plural marriage with fabric-based sculptures of 19th-century hats (very “Handmaid’s Tale”).
So, how did a Frida Kahlo painting about the 1938 suicide of a New York socialite and Ziegfeld showgirl end up in the Arizona desert two decades later? Well, the final step through the door is shrouded under the terms of “anonymous donation,” but the rest of the painting’s biography is well-documented.
The story starts with Clare Booth Luce, the magazine editor and author of the hit play “The Women.” (She would go on to become a congresswoman and ambassador.) She commissioned the already-famous artist to paint a portrait of her friend Hale, whom Kahlo also knew. Expecting something more celebratory, Luce was shocked by the final work, which depicts the young woman in mid-fall from the window of her Central Park South apartment building — and also, in the same image, dead and bleeding on the pavement.
According to FridaKahlo.org, Luce considered destroying the painting but was persuaded by friends to desist.
“At Clare’s request, sculptor Isamu Noguchi paint (ed) out the part of the legend that has Luce’s name,” the website’s history explains.
“Clare gave the painting to her friend Frank Crowninshield and after Frank passed away his son returned it to Clare’s family. After that this painting was left in storage for decades. It was donated it anonymously to the Phoenix Art Museum.”
It’s unclear if the painting passed through an intermediary owner, but clearly it has found a better home than family storage.