The Women Who Built the New York Art World

Lillie P. Bliss (1864–1931)

Co-founded MoMA in 1929

Lillie P. Bliss, the daughter of a wealthy textile merchant from Boston, didn’t conform to late-19th century expectations of women. Bliss never married, she owned her own shiny Pierce Arrow limousine (she loved cars), and she developed a voracious and discerning appetite for art. “She was an advocate for modern art when it had few admirers, a patron when it had almost no market,” wrote philanthropist Eleanor Robson Belmont of Bliss in a 1931 catalogue commemorating her iconic art collection.

Bliss was one of New York’s first major collectors of modern art. Her lovingly cultivated cache of great works by Cézanne, Daumier, Redon, Seurat, Gauguin, Modigliani, Monet, and more would become the foundation of one of the most important public collections in the United States.

In November 1929, at the age of 65, Bliss and friends Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan (budding collectors themselves), met for lunch to discuss opening a public museum devoted to contemporary art, which didn’t yet exist in New York. Later that year, they opened The Museum of Modern Art at 730 Fifth Avenue. Bliss devoted the last two years of her life to shepherding the museum’s early growth—and gifted 150 of her prized pieces to the new institution.

Bliss’s renegade tastes and support of young artists also helped to set the stage for collecting in America. At the legendary 1913 Armory Show, where European paintings by the likes of Matisse and Duchamp shocked American critics, she had bought her first works of art: three by Renoir and a whopping eight by Redon.

When she died in 1931, a new apartment that she’d purchased specifically for the display of her collection brimmed with works like Daumier’s The Laundress (c. 1863) and Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (No. 9) (c. 1897). Paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and Davies covered her living room, while woodcuts by Gauguin and etchings by Picasso decorated her hallways.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874–1948)

Co-founded MoMA in 1929

In the early 1900s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art routinely refused to show or accept donations of  contemporary artwork. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who began collecting art in 1925, was an avid opponent of this conservative approach. (In 1929, the Met declined the donation of her own significant modern art holdings.) She believed that radical contemporary artists like Matisse, Diego Rivera, and Georgia O’Keeffe should be patronized, and given a public platform too.

A society girl from Providence, Rhode Island, Aldrich Rockefeller married the quiet, rigid, and wildly wealthy John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (son of famed oil baron John D. Rockefeller) in 1901. She fast established a reputation as one of New York’s most prominent hostess-philanthropists. But the causes she chose to support—women’s advancement and art—were unconventional. And though her passions were often questioned by her husband and his circle, she pursued them vigorously until her death.

She’d developed her interest in avant-garde art during a European sojourn in her late teens. After returning to New York and settling into her 10-story mansion with her husband, Aldrich Rockefeller continued to surround herself with art and artists. She invited Matisse to dinner, befriended bohemian painters like Marguerite Zorach, and invited Rivera to paint a massive mural in her husband’s swankiest property: the Rockefeller Center. (The mural was famously destroyed in 1934, following controversy surrounding the artist’s inclusion of a portrait of Lenin.)

Her reigning achievement, though, was co-founding MoMA with Bliss and Sullivan. It was Aldrich Rockefeller who convinced her husband to underwrite the museum and give up a prime slice of real estate to use as its sculpture garden. And it was she who donated 181 gems from her collection, by the likes of Seurat and Van Gogh, to the museum, as well as gifting important works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters.

Mary Quinn Sullivan (1877–1939)

Co-founded MoMA in 1929

Mary Quinn Sullivan began her adult life as an artist and art teacher, surrounding herself with pioneering women. (For a short stint, Sullivan roomed with artist and suffragist Katherine Dreier, and her various New York homes became stomping grounds for creatives of all stripes.) After studying at Pratt, she left for Europe to school herself in its art education strategies, and became enamored with avant-garde European movements like Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

The excursion spurred her collecting habits. And upon returning to New York, she, like Bliss, acquired some of her first art at the 1913 Armory Show. Later, with her husband (lawyer and rare book collector, Cornelius Sullivan) she scooped up works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Picasso, Derain, Modigliani, and more.

When Sullivan joined forces with Bliss and Aldrich Rockefeller to establish MoMA in 1929, she shaped its educational mission, which remains an integral facet of the institution today. She remained a museum trustee until 1933, leaving a year after she’d opened a commercial art gallery that showed work by American and European artists like Chaim Soutine. There, Sullivan hired Betty Parsons, who would later open her own legendary New York gallery.

Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944)

Hosted an influential salon for avant-garde artists and writers

Painter Florine Stettheimer’s Bryant Park-facing studio doubled as the Jazz Age’s most idiosyncratic, and by many accounts, fruitful, salon. One of Stettheimer’s paintings captures the carnivalesque scene that many of her contemporaries recounted. In Studio Party (1917-1919), cultural figures lounge and pore over the art displayed on almost every surface of the pink room. They include Stettheimer, her sister and fellow saloniste Ettie, sculptor Gaston Lachaise and his wife and muse Isabel, Cubist painter Albert Gleizes, playwright Avery Hopwood, critic Leo Stein, Hindu poet Sankar, and—for good measure—a harlequin.

It was common for Stettheimer to gather a similarly diverse group of artists within the studio she legendarily decorated with iridescent cellophane, profusions of flowers, and a large nude self-portrait. Other regular Stettheimer salon attendees included friends like Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Harlem Renaissance patron and documentarian Carl Van Vechten, and Marcel Duchamp. Like Gertrude Stein’s contemporaneous salons in bohemian Paris, Stettheimer offered an environment that encouraged open creative exchange between artists of all genders, backgrounds, and chosen mediums.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942)

Founded Whitney Museum in 1930

Unlike many of her collector-philanthropist peers, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney focused on American art, rather than European. While she studied sculpture in Paris (and was once critiqued by Auguste Rodin), she established her studio in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, she forged bronze objects depicting soldiers at war or busts of mythical figures—and created massive public sculptures. She would later transform the space into the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio became her second home, where she could make work and entertain creative friends away from the traditional tastes of her husband, Harry Payne Whitney, who didn’t take her art practice seriously. (He also refused to let her hang Robert Henri’s striking portrait of her in their shared home, because he didn’t want his friends to see a picture of his wife, as he said, “in pants”—the mark of the era’s “new woman.” She hung it her studio instead.)

The space also became a haven for young artists who were attracted to her free spirit, adventurous taste, and penchant for throwing parties. In 1914, she turned the network of apartments that surrounded her studio into Whitney Studio, where she exhibited the work of emerging, unrepresented painters and sculptors from her community. In the process, she amassed a collection of over 500 pieces of American art, including works by the then-unknown John Sloan, Edward Hopper, and Joseph Stella.

In 1929, she offered the trove, along with a several-million-dollar endowment, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When they refused it, she turned Whitney Studio into an unprecedented institution: one that focused solely on emerging American art. The Whitney Museum of American Art came to life in 1931 on West Eighth Street. Today, while the institution has outgrown its original home many times over, its focus remains the most influential and radical art made in this country.

Grace Nail Johnson (1885–1976)

Patron and mentor of Harlem Renaissance artists

Grace Nail Johnson was known as “the grand dame of Harlem.” She earned the title by tirelessly supporting the arts and activist causes, primarily Civil Rights and the Women’s Suffrage Movement. The Harlem home she shared with her husband (the poet, writer, and activist James Weldon Johnson) became a sanctuary for Harlem Renaissance writers, painters, and musicians. There, Nail Johnson would survey their work and offer sage advice, in turn assuming the role of mentor for young artists.

As the only black member of Heterodoxy, a feminist debate club in Greenwich village, she also voiced her passionate commitment to equal rights for women and the black community. Among other activist achievements, she founded the NAACP Junior League in 1929, and made a trip to the White House in 1941 at Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation, to discuss race relations.

Her fight for equality extended to art, too. After her husband’s death, she and Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten established the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of American Negro Arts and Letters (now called the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection) at Yale University. An essential act of artistic preservation when many established museums and institutions ignored art made by people of color, it remains one of the most important archives of art, writing, and ephemera documenting the Harlem Renaissance’s vast creative output.

Helen Clay Frick (1888–1984)

Opened The Frick Collection in 1935

When Helen Clay Frick was 31 years old, she inherited $38 million—and subsequently became the richest woman in America. At a young age, she’d already taken a shine to her father’s collection, which included masterpieces by Turner, Constable, Gainsborough, and Vermeer, among other great Old Master and European artists. Just after she turned 21, she assembled a two-volume catalogue detailing the family’s art.

Frick had always been independent and ambitious: she never married, and after her father died, she oversaw a stipulation in his will that his collection become a public museum. In 1935, The Frick Collection opened in the family’s mansion on 5th Avenue. Frick breathed life into it by encouraging new acquisitions. Along with eight other trustees, she advised that the museum purchase works by Piero della Francesca, Duccio, Goya, Monet, Ingres, Rembrandt, and others to add to its ornate halls.

Frick also led the creation of another New York art world treasure: the Frick Art Reference Library. Originally housed in the mansion’s subterranean bowling alley, it moved to a building on 71st Street and opened to the public in 1924. Including over 228,000 books, it houses a vast reservoir of information documenting European and American art from the 4th to the mid-20th centuries.

Hilla Rebay (1890–1967)

CO-FOUNDEd THE MUSEUM OF NON-OBJECTIVE PAINTING in 1939, LATER RENAMED THE SOLOMON R. Guggenheim Museum

A baroness born into an aristocratic family in Alsace, Germany, Hilla Rebay refused to heed her father’s wishes for her future. “You are my virtuous daughter, go find a husband, end of story,” he once said. “I will not tolerate having any artists in my family.” Instead, she forged her own path. Rebay never married. Instead, she became an artist, moved to America, and inspired the creation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She also led the institution’s trailblazing program of abstract art as its first director.  

Rebay’s interest in art emerged at a young age; the Guggenheim Museum Archives contain a delicate self-portrait Rebay drew at the age of 14. After honing her skills in art schools across Europe, where she was exposed to the Der Blaue Reiter movement, she took up non-objective (or abstract) painting. Her interest in the style was stoked by friendships with pioneering artists Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp, who introduced her to Wassily Kandinsky’s seminal manifesto on abstraction. She would soon become one of its most outspoken champions.

When she immigrated to New York in 1927, she carried with her a passionate dream: to establish a “museum-temple” where the public could be exposed to non-objective art. A year later, she met wealthy businessman Solomon R. Guggenheim, who sat for a portrait in her studio. The fateful event led to a lifelong personal and professional partnership that precipitated the formation of the Guggenheim Museum.

Through Rebay’s connections, she, Guggenheim, and his wife Irene met Kandinsky on a group trip to Europe. There, Guggenheim made a watershed acquisition: the painter’s masterful Composition 8 (1923). It sparked his appetite for collecting, which was guided by Rebay’s expertise. Together, they established The Museum of Non-Objective Painting at 24 East 54th Street in Manhattan in 1939. She became its director and filled the space with the era’s most daring and influential art—Calder, Klee, and Mondrian—along with wafts of incense and melodies by Bach and Beethoven.

When the museum’s collection outgrew its 54th Street home, she and Guggenheim commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design new headquarters for the institution. The resulting white temple spiraled into the sky, reflecting the ideals of abstract art that Rebay cherished.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979)

Founded Art of this Century Gallery in 1942

“Not until Art of This Century did it occur to Americans that a gallery could be a cross between an amusement park, a haunted house, and a Paris cafe,” wrote Peggy Guggenheim’s biographer, Francine Prose, of the gallery Guggenheim established on West 57th Street in 1942.

By that time, Guggenheim was known in bohemian art circles for her eccentric tastes. The daughter of a family with a 19th-century mining fortune to its name (and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim), she began traveling and buying art in her early twenties. She rubbed elbows with the likes of Dada master Marcel Duchamp, sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and novelist Djuna Barnes in the early 1920s in Paris. Later, after she moved to London, she developed a passion for art by Salvador Dalí, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, and Francis Picabia, and added to her collection at a breakneck pace. In her tell-all memoir Out of This Century (1979), she wrote: “My motto was ‘buy a picture a day’ and I lived up to it.”

It was this vast collection of avant-garde art that she hastily brought back to New York in the early 1940s, as World War II intensified, with the help of her lover, artist Max Ernst. In 1942, dissatisfied by the museums she visited upon returning to the States (she described The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, founded by her uncle and Rebay, as “a joke”), she opened her own museum-cum-gallery, which she dubbed Art of this Century. The space would show facets of her permanent collection, as well as sell art by experimental artists of the Surrealist, Dadaist, and Cubist movements.

Jackson Pollock had his first solo show there in 1943. Guggenheim was also famously committed to showing women artists—rare for art institutions of the time. She was one of the first gallerists to exhibit the work of Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Louise Bourgeois, and mounted two large-scale group shows and 12 solo presentations of work by women.  

While Guggenheim closed Art of this Century in 1947, she established a model for commercial galleries and art institutions interested in experimental art over the course of its five-year existence. Later, she brought her iconic collection back to Europe where she opened the Peggy Guggenheim Collection—a public exhibition space nestled in an 18th-century Venetian palazzo. There, she’d famously live out her days in the company of 14 Lhasa Apso dogs and her prized cache of paintings and sculptures.  

Betty Parsons (1900–1982)

Founded Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946

Parsons was introduced to art at the age of 13, when she visited the infamous 1913 Armory Show. It was then that she vowed to devote her life to the medium, becoming first an artist and later a legendary gallerist.

Parsons opened her eponymous gallery in 1946 on Manhattan’s 57th Street. Her tastes in art had always been progressive, and she immediately brought the radical work of the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement into the space. “People would slash the paintings,” said Hedda Sterne, a painter and friend of Parsons. “Everybody was telling Betty everything she showed was nonsense, but she had the courage of her opinions.”

Famously, Parsons represented Abstract Expressionism’s most venerated painters: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, who she affectionately called the “Four Horsemen.” But she also represented female, African-American, Latin American, and Asian artists when few other American galleries did. They included Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Roberto Matta, Kenzo Okada, and Thomas Sills. “I never thought about whether the artist was a male or a female,” she said in a 1977 interview. “I always thought: ‘Are they good or not good?’”

Parsons forged the model for the modern American gallery, an accomplishment noted by both the artists who surrounded her and the gallerists who came after her. “Betty and her gallery helped construct the center of the art world,” said Helen Frankenthaler. Leo Castelli, who opened his own influential gallery in 1957 said: “It was the beginning of a great moment in American art that started there at Betty Parsons’s. For the first time, a great original art movement took place in America.”