The fair, running through Sept. 27 at the Breuer, sees galleries dedicate prime real estate to household names like Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, along with lesser known artists who operated far beyond the bounds of Abstract Expressionism.
This is “The Overlook,” a column by Sarah Cascone about the lives and work of artists who have been passed over, excluded from, or otherwise left out of the mainstream art world.
If there’s one art fair seemingly made for “The Overlook,” it’s New York’s Independent 20th Century, which invites dealers to present work broadening the canon of 20th-century art each September. With that in mind, I headed to Thursday’s opening at the Breuer, the famed Brutalist building that reopened as the Sotheby’s flagship last November. I was pleased to find a strong showing of AbEx women artists and intrigued by a broader focus on female practitioners tackling abstraction, often with a more geometric, hard-edged approach, beyond the confines of the movement.
There was work on offer by Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, as well as less familiar AbEx artists such as Mercedes Matter and Charlotte Park. Appearances from Alice Trumbull Mason and Esphyr Slobodkina offered a reminder that even as the AbEx women begin to get the recognition they have deserved all along, others who helped pioneer abstract painting are still waiting in the shadows.
It’s no secret that the market for AbEx women has grown in leaps and bounds over the last decade. The show that experts often cite as a watershed moment was “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” curated by Gwen Chanzit at the Denver Art Museum in 2016. There were 12 women in the exhibition, and 40 in the catalogue. It was like a treasure chest of forgotten art, waiting to be unlocked—and in the decade since, the riches have poured out.
“Paintings that 10 years ago were $300,000 to $500,000 are now easily $3 million to $5 million—and at Gagosian, $6 million to $7 million. You can feel that progression continuing to happen,” says art advisor Saara Pritchard in a phone interview.
Of course, that change didn’t happen overnight. Pritchard was a vice president at Christie’s when the Denver exhibition opened and organized a talk about it timed to the auction house’s sale of works by artists in the show including Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner. “It was so poorly attended,” she recalls. “The show certainly pointed to the disparity in value between these female artists and their male counterparts.”
Rediscovering the work of these women was a way to right an art historical wrong. It was also a business opportunity. The market for their male counterparts—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell—was so expensive that only the wealthiest collectors could afford their work, on the rare occasion that it came up for sale.
“A lot of these women artists, their work wasn’t worth almost anything when they died. It was near impossible for their estates to remain organized and intact,” continues Pritchard. “It really is galleries who love telling these stories and are passionate about the work assembling it behind the scenes.”
For Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, who opened their New York gallery Berry Campbell in 2013, the Denver show became a guiding star in their work championing historically marginalized artists. “The exhibition catalogue really became our reference point,” says Berry. “We started researching: ‘Who is this person, where do they live, and can we find more art by them?’”
At Independent, Berry Campbell’s booth is a tribute to Eleanor Ward and the Stable Gallery, which she ran from 1953 to 1970. The dealer was instrumental in the rise of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, particularly with her “Stable Annual” shows from 1953 to ’57.
“As women art dealers, Martha and I wanted to pay tribute to another art dealer who had the foresight and the vision and was not afraid to show some lesser known women artists,” Berry tells me.
For the fair, the gallery has brought together 13 Stable alumni, from Mary Abbott to Yvonne Thomas. Among the booth’s standouts is Peter (Peter Fried), a 1956 Elaine de Kooning painting of her brother. The gallery believes the piece was in the artist’s first solo show, held that same year at Stable Gallery. It’s priced at $745,000—one of the more expensive of the Berry Campbell’s offerings, which range in price from $15,000 to $2.15 million for a large Mitchell from around 1957. And the canvas offers a preview of sorts for the gallery’s next show, “Elaine de Kooning (1919–1989),” opening Oct. 30.
Mitchell has another star turn at the fair with New York’s Bueno and Co., pairing her with her friend and fellow American-expat-in-Paris Kimber Smith. The gallery has reunited a selection of Mitchell’s rarely-seen sketchbook works dating from about 1967.
Though this is the first U.S. showing of these drawings, Mitchell’s works on paper were the subject of a 1992 exhibition at the Breuer, back when it was home to the Whitney Museum of American Art. The works, still with the strip of holes torn from a spiral-bound sketchbook on top, are going for $175,000 each, with a large untitled oil painting from 1958 available for $1.2 million.
And de Kooning is also the subject of a solo booth from New York’s Olney Gleason, focusing on her “Bacchus” paintings, inspired by a statue of the titular Roman god in Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg. There are roughly 100 paintings in the vibrantly colorful series, which dates from 1976 to 1983 and hasn’t had a dedicated presentation since 1993.
The works, priced $150,000 to $1.1 million, come from a key time in the artist’s career, after her reconciliation with husband Willem following a long separation. “This was a very productive period for her. He also made some of the greatest paintings of his entire career in ’76 and ’77. There was a real efflorescence in both of their work,” Nick Olney, co-founder of Olney Gleason, tells CULTURED. He thinks similar moments will emerge from the careers of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, his long-overshadowed wife, in “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” opening Oct. 4 at the Met.
“These were really relationships of equals,” Olney adds. (The gallery, which has worked with the Krasner estate for a decade in its former incarnation as Kasmin, is teaming up with Gagosian and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation for Krasner’s first solo show in France, opening Oct. 19 at Gagosian’s Paris outpost.)
Another artist known primarily through the lens of a more famous man is Hilla von Rebay, who was the first director and co-founder, with Solomon R. Guggenheim, of the Guggenheim New York. But she was also an abstract painter and collage artist in her own right. Her work is on view at Independent with Los Angeles’s Weinstein Gallery, alongside that of the artists she helped collect for the Guggenheim collection, originally called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.
“Hilla believed art didn’t need any representational object to be profound,” Kendy Genovese, the gallery’s curator, tells CULTURED. “If you had the right combination of shapes and sizes and colors laid together in a certain way, it could open up something for her that was literally spiritual.”
That was the guiding principle that drove Von Rebay both as Guggenheim’s advisor and in her own practice. But Genovese believes Von Rebay has not received enough credit for her role in shaping Modern art. Much of the work in the booth was actually deaccessioned by the Guggenheim in the 1970s and ’80s, as the museum expanded its remit beyond the non-objective work Von Rebay had championed.
Weinstein has priced Von Rebay’s work somewhat aggressively. Her early collages cost between $35,000 and $48,000, with paintings starting at $175,000. The star of the booth is Con fuoco, a bright purple canvas from 1945 that set an auction record for the artist with a $182,700 sale at Rago/Wright in Chicago in May 2024. Here, it’s priced at $850,000.
“We think that it’s worthy,” says Genovese. “At the end of the day, the market will decide.”
The booth also has a geometric painting by Alice Trumbull Mason, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. Born in 1904, Mason studied under Arshile Gorky and was a close friend of Piet Mondrian. Von Rebay became a patron, providing a monthly stipend of $15 so that Mason, who had two young children and a sea captain husband who was away for months at a time, could continue making art. The artist died in 1971. Not long after, in 1973, she had a major retrospective at the Whitney—but her time in the spotlight quickly passed.
Elsewhere at Independent, New York’s Galerie Lelong has a solo presentation dedicated to Mason’s work, with paintings priced between $100,000 and $200,000. It’s Lelong’s first time showing Mason, whose estate was represented by New York’s Washburn Gallery from 1973 until the gallery’s closing in 2024.
Also enjoying a major moment at Rosenberg & Co.’s booth is Esphyr Slobodkina. Born in Russia in 1908, she was an early abstract artist who often incorporated fabric into her work, but her greatest commercial success came in the form of children’s books. Slobodkina collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown, author of the all-time favorite Goodnight Moon, and even wrote and illustrated her own children’s classic, Caps for Sale, in 1940. The book has sold 7.5 million copies to date, but Slobodkina’s paintings have fallen into obscurity.
“One of the problems was that hers wasn’t a very linear career,” says Kadie Ross, the gallery’s director. “She tended to bounce back and forth between hard-edged abstractions and other ventures.”
The artist’s estate is represented by LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, but next month, Rosenberg & Co. is opening Slobodkina’s first New York solo show since 2004. The artist also has a traveling show with Louise Nevelson that is currently on view at Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of American Art through Nov. 1. At the fair, works range from $10,000 to $100,000.
Artists like Mason and Slobodkina don’t fit neatly into the narrative of 20th century American art, with its emphasis on the AbEx and Pop Art movements. But they say a rising tide lifts all boats—perhaps the boom for AbEx women can prompt interest in 20th-century women abstractionists more broadly.
Even Berry Campbell is branching out. One of the other artists it has brought to the fair is Edith Schloss, who was a member of the Club with all the leading mid-century New York artists, but whose non-representational paintings represented her own distinct brand of abstraction. “What we’re realizing is that there were other Abstract Expressionists, other abstract artists, and women who didn’t really fit the mold exactly,” Berry said.
At Independent, thankfully, there is room for all of them.