about impresario
Impresario Project publishes profiles, reviews and essays on many subjects including art, biography studies and visual culture. The website is published by author Henry Martin.
This page publishes research on the little-documented history of women as art dealers in the US before 1950.
Related topics include American art, exhibition history, modernism, New York art market, history of collecting, history of dealing, biography studies, museology, art historiography, and history of publishing and the material and visual cultures.
resources
This list includes links to a number of databases and websites for those interested in exploring visual culture, modernism, life narrative studies, and the broader humanities. Click on the attachment link.
about henry martin
Henry Martin is author of Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon (Schaffner Press, 2018), Yappo (Company Cod, 2017) and contributor to Phaidon Press's Great Women Artists (2019) and Great Women Painters (2022). His book How to Love the Whole World (With Artist Agnes Martin) will be published by Cameron Kids/Abrams in 2024.
Henry has contributed to Hyperallergic, Irish Times, RTE Radio 1, Burlington Magazine, Home Cultures Journal, Irish Journal of American Studies, House Magazine, and his poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have been published in the US, UK, Mexico and Ireland.
Henry teaches creative writing at CityLit, London, Henry was Lecturer in Art History in University College Cork in 2022-2023 and Lecturer in Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design 2021-present. He has also lectured at Camberwell College of Art, UCA Farnham and the Edinburgh College of Art.
Henry is recipient of two Tavolozza Foundation scholarships, a NCAD Scholarship, and he was a Fulbright-Creative Ireland Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art in 2022.
Henry has a BA in English and Philosophy (NUIG), a MA in Theatre (Royal Holloway) and a MRES in the Art Market and the History of Collecting (University of Buckingham). He is completing a PhD in Art History at NCAD.
a-z list of women art dealers
Art dealer: noun, a person who buys and sells works of art. (Collins English Dictionary, 2022)
Since 2015 I have collected names of women art dealers (mostly in America), with a general view on the 1900–1950 period and a focus on the 1930s.
I would love to hear from you if you have information on the names highlighted and/or if you are undertaking your own research on this dealer and their gallery/ activities. From January 2022 I began adding women dealers from other countries.
Notes:
1. Most of these dealers, but not all, operated galleries or initiatives under their own name. Some were assistants in a gallery, or freelance "curators".
2. In this list, for brevity, I have omitted gallery names.
3. The below list concentrates on the period 1900–1950 and does not reflect the complete list I am working on.
4. The word "dealer" is an umbrella term. Early dealers were often called gallerists, managers, directors and curators.
For the most part I do not include the names of women collectors who also may have infrequently consigned or sold work to another dealer or customer; the main exception is Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) who I include in the below list as a point of clarification (and also because she often sold works she no longer wanted).
With the exception of Stein, for the purposes of this project, I consider a dealer to be anybody who organized an exhibition—or ran an enterprise—with the express aim to "sell" art. (Dealer is distinct to Agent, though arguably agents such as Cassatt and Tyson Hallowell were proto-dealers). I have also included the names of women who founded Societies or Associations (Wheeler) or Expositions (Duane Gillespie), wherein art was sold, even if these societies looked and operated differently to our present-day concept of a dealer-gallery system.
If you believe more names should be added to this list, please navigate to the contact page to get in touch.
Country designates where the dealer predominantly (and/or latterly) operated; not necessarily their nationality. Many Europeans emigrated to the US between 1900 and 1950; and some dealers, like the American, Peggy Guggenheim, established galleries (however short lived) in France, UK, and US.
The following people are listed as German though they operated elsewhere: Käte Perls, operated in Berlin, Paris, and New York; Grete Ring operated in Berlin, then London; Marianne Breslauer Feilchenfeldt operated in Berlin, Amsterdam and Zurich.
Black = American
Blue = French
Red = German, (German-Swiss)
Green= UK
Pink = Netherlands, Scandinavia
Orange = Italy
Allendy, Colette
Annot [Jacobi]
Anneberg, Marjorie
Asher, Betty M.
Bachert, Hildegard
Bacon, Virginia P.
Bank, Florence
Baron, Ella
Baum, Jan
Beer-Monti, Frederica
Bondi-Jari, Lea
Boone, Mary
Borgenicht, Grace
Boughton, Alice
Brausen, Erica
Braunstein, Ruth
Bremer, Anja
Breteau, Denise
Brown, Margaret
Browse, Lillian
Bryant, Harriet C.
Bucher, Jeanne
Cane, Florence
Cardazzo, Gabriella
Caspari, Anna
Cassatt, Mary
Castel, Jeanne
Clert, Iris
Coleman, Alannah
Coleman Manshel, Anita Colin, Christiane
Conti, Lydia
Cooper, Paula
Courvoisier, Moira (Wallace)
Copley, Claire
Creelman, Alice
Curttis-Gould, Leah
Cuttoli, Marie
Davidge, Clara (Potter)
Dausset, Nina
De Coninck, Suzanne
Denney, Alice
Diament Sujo, Clara
Dintenfass, Terry
van Doesburg, Nelly
Dorrance, Nesta
Dreier, Katherine S.
Dunbar-Kilburn, Cecilia
Dudensing, Bibi
Dwan, Virginia
Epstein, Evan
Esman, Rosa
Ey, Johanna
Parker, Gertrud
Paris Dorothy
Parsons, Betty
Passendoit, Georgette
Payson, Joan Whitney
Pearl, Marilyn
Perls (née Kolker), Käte
Peterson, Joan
Poindexter, Elinor
von Porada, Käthe
Prévot, Myriam
Quinn Sullivan, Mary
von Rebay, Hilla
Reed, Alma
René, Denise
Rigelhaupt, Eleanor
Ring, Grete
Robles, Esther
Roberts, Colette
Robinson, Increase
Rockwell, Betty
Roosevelt, Jean. S.
Rose, Murial
Rosengart, Angela
Ross, Ann
Ross, Linda
Rouiller, Alice
Saidenberg, Eleanore B.
Schaefer, Bertha
Schaeffer, Kate
Scheyer, Galka
Seachrest, Effie
Selick, Arlene
Serger, Helen
Shaw, Lois
Silverman, Iris
Snyderman, Ruth
Solomon, Holly
Sonnabend, Ilena
Sonnabend, Joan
Sothmann, Magdalene
Speyer, Darthea
Stein, Gertrude (b. 1927)
Stein, Gertrude
Sterner, Marie (Norton)
Story, Ala
Sujo, Clara Diament
Sundell, Nina (Castelli)
Talalay, Marjorie
Taylor, Mildred D.
Teschner, Ruth
Turnbull, Peggy
de Tour, Irena Urdang
Faure, Patricia
Feilchenfeldt (Breslauer), Marianne
Felsen, Rosamund
Fleischman, Martha
Force, Juliana
Fischback, Marilyn (Cole)
Francis, Emily A.
Fried, Rose
Frost, Leslie (Ballantine) Garman, Kathleen
Gechtoff, Ethel
Gee, Helen
Gibbons, Sallie (J.) (or Sadie)
Gillespie, Elizabeth (Duane)
Goodman, Marian
Granoff, Katia
Grosman, Tatyana
Gruskin, Mary J.
Guggenheim, Peggy
Hackett, Helen (Sr.)
Hackett, Helen (Jr.)
Halpert, Edith (Gregor)
Hallowell, Sara(h) T(yson)
Harriman, Marie
Harvey, Emily
Hearn, Pat
Heap, Jane
Herzbrun, Helene
Hooks, Geri
Horne, Alice Merrill
Horne, Grace
Hutton, Dorothy
Jackson, Martha (Kellog)
Jacobi, Lotte
Juda, Annely
Judd Ryan, Beatrice