Thanksgiving. Sipping
drinks before the start of the meal, catching up on the ‘what’s new’ of the
past year with John, a friend of the family since before I was born. To my surprise and delight, John told me
about his mother’s art collection. I
guess I had always kind of known that John’s family was into art, but this
Thanksgiving, I found out that John’s mother (who died in 2009) had actually
run a successful art gallery in San Francisco –the Dorothy Weiss Gallery, until
her retirement in 2000. Art collecting
was her passion; it filled her life (both literally filling her home, and
filling her creative energies) for over two decades. Did I want to see her personal collection,
still arranged as she had laid it out, at the house of John’s elderly father? Absolutely.
I headed over to the Weiss house the next day. Dorothy Weiss had collected a whole range of
contemporary art, but her favorites seemed to have been ceramics. I had not heard of all the artists, but a
couple of the works were the more famous sorts, including, for example a work
by Peter Voulkous, a ceramics sculptor known for moving ceramics away from beyond
tight ties to utility and function, into creations that were solely fine
art. What I enjoyed most about the visit
was the sense of discovery moving through all the artwork in the house. Dorothy Weiss had pieces of her collection on
the coffee table, arranged next to the piano, in the garden, on all the walls
–basically in just about every appropriate corner of her home. Each of the works could have been studied and
analyzed on its own, but it was their interaction with each other and with the
real, functional living space that made the strongest impression. I’ve appreciated for a while how great art
collections –carefully planned and put together, can be conceived of themselves
as works of art, but it was only while walking through Dorothy Weiss’ house
that I really understood this viscerally.
I’ve been thinking again of my experience seeing Dorothy
Weiss’ collection since a classmate gave a presentation last week about some
important female art collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. “Matrons of the Arts”, she
called them. Her presentation focused on Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Isabella Stewart Gardener, and her thesis was that, although we art historians talk a
lot about how few female artists have risen to fame and power, how it seems in
art that traditionally men have been the creators and women the muses, in fact,
these women collectors were hugely influential in shaping culture and aesthetics.
Gardener was instrumental in bringing interest in the European avant garde to
American audiences (movements like Impressionism), and Whitney insisted on opening
a space in high museum culture for American artists. The art world today would not be the same
without these women.
Visiting Dorothy Weiss’s house, I’ve come to see how much
art collectors are creators in their own way, how each collection is individual
and reflects on the vision and personality of the man or woman who brought it
together. Thus, the critical description
of an art world in which men are creators and women are muses is in fact more
complicated. Women like Whitney, and Gardener
in the early twentieth century, as well as, more humbly perhaps but still
importantly, Dorothy Weiss in the twenty-first century, were creators in the
art world as much as any of the male (and the few female) artists whose art
works can be found in their collections.
