These Are the Women Who Founded Some of New York’s Greatest Art Museums

Think of a favorite work of art you’ve seen in New York, and there’s a good chance it was brought to you by a woman. From The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh at MoMA to El Greco’s View of Toledo at The Met to the entire Whitney Museum of American Art, some of the city’s greatest museums were founded, funded or fundamentally established through the efforts of women.

On the occasion of the recent release of Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art and the major exhibition, “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” which opened on November 17, Observer caught up with Ann Temkin, the Marie Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, as we looked into the women who made New York one of the art capitals of the world.

The most surprising thing she and her co-curators Romy Silver Kohn and Rachel Remick found, Temkin said, was just how many women played major roles in the formation of museums. “It’s incredible,” she admitted, “We still are sort of mind-boggled. We opened such a door into a universe for ourselves. We realized that it’s just a tiny bit of something so much larger.”

MoMA is using the exhibition, on view through March 29, 2025, to celebrate the legacy of Lillie P. Bliss (1864-1931) and the 90th anniversary of her massive gift of art that transformed the institution into a collecting museum. When visitors enter the show, they’ll find not just her story but also those of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948) and Mary Quinn Sullivan (1877-1939). In 1928, the three women—a socialite, a relative recluse and a radical artist—decided something had to be done about the fact that there was no place in New York to show the exciting work that was being done in the early 20th Century. They decided to change that, raised funds and founded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. Their stories are paired with some of the museum’s most iconic works, including Paul Cézanne’s The Bather, Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, all there courtesy of Lillie P. Bliss.

The obvious question is why it took almost 100 years to tell the stories of the women who created MoMA. Temkin has some theories. “It was, for the most part, men who were writing the history books,” she said. “And they were looking where they were looking and telling the history as they saw it. There’s just no denying now that stories were told through a very incomplete lens, and one that tended to consciously or unconsciously diminish or omit the accomplishments of women. What was so striking to us was this realization that it was not that those women didn’t exist. It was simply that the work of those women had not been recorded by those who were recording the history.”

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She added that most of the women involved tended to understate their own importance. “Whether that was their canny sense of ‘I’ll get all this accomplished if I don’t broadcast it too much’ or a more straightforward modesty and humility or any number of other hypotheses, they tended not to be figures who made it a top priority that they become celebrated.” The time is ripe, though, for that celebration, so here are the stories of five more women who disregarded societal norms and built institutions to house their passion for art.

Impressionist-inspired Louisine Havemeyer

A search of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website keyed to “Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929” returns an astonishing 2,387 artworks, from Japanese sword hilts and Tiffany vases to hundreds of paintings and sculptures. Along with El Greco’s moody, glorious View of Toledo, there’s also one of the finest of the Met’s fine Rembrandts, Portrait of Herman Doomer. In fact, the Havemeyer collection once filled a room with nine Rembrandts. But it was Louisine Havemeyer’s gift of Impressionist paintings that transformed the Met’s collection from largely historical to suddenly au courant.

Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer (1855-1929) started collecting as Louisine Elder, a young woman in Paris squeezing Impressionist pastels out of her spending money. She was guided by the unerring eye of her friend, Mary Cassatt. When she met and wed Henry Havemeyer, a sugar baron with a fortune, he caught the collecting bug. They amassed an unmatched cache of artworks and housed them in their Fifth Avenue home, gifting works to The Met during their lives and then bequeathing, at Louisine Havemeyer’s death, a flood of light and color in the form of room upon room of 19th-century French masterworks by Manet, Monet, Cezanne and Degas. No less an authority than the Musée d’Orsay claimed that it was the Havemeyers who introduced Impressionism to America in its 1998 exhibition “Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection.”

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s museum of her own

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942) was born into enormous wealth, and, as an artist herself, she was always eager to support other artists. As a young woman, she traveled to Montmartre and Montparnasse in France and decided she would pursue the life of a sculptor. She trained seriously, later attending New York’s Art Students League and exhibiting under an assumed name, believing her work would not be taken seriously otherwise. In 1907, she rented a studio space in Greenwich Village and then a separate building nearby, as a place where local artists could meet and exhibit their newest works. She bought art, enabling other artists to pay their rent, and organized exhibitions.

In 1929, the same year that Louisine Havemeyer bequeathed the Metropolitan Museum of Art over 2,000 works, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney approached the institution with an offer of her own: over 600 works by contemporary American artists and the money to house and display them. The Met refused. So, she built her own museum. In 1930, the Whitney Museum of American Art came into being on West 8th Street with over 1,000 works by modern American masters like Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Berenice Abbott and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Hilla Rebay sought the spiritual in art

“Instrumental to the creation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum” is how the Guggenheim itself describes artist, curator and inaugural director Hilla von Rebay (1890-1967). Rebay was a painter who emerged from a particularly fertile incubator for Modern Art. Born in Strasbourg, she inhabited the intellectual circles of the Bauhaus and Der Blaue Reiter, absorbing beliefs about the spiritual capacities of art from Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Sophie Taeuber and Franz Marc. She became deeply committed to non-objective art, or, as we know it now, abstraction.

In 1928, she moved to New York with the idea of starting a museum. An accomplished artist with good connections, she quickly secured a portrait commission from Solomon Guggenheim. The rest is art history. Through Rebay, Guggenheim’s eyes were opened to abstraction. He and his wife traveled with Rebay, took her advice on which artists to select, and built a collection that brought an entirely new vision to the United States. In 1939, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened, and in 1943, Rebay and Guggenheim commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic 1959 building. Everything we think of when we picture the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was informed by Rebay’s vision—she served as its director for thirteen years.

Aileen Osborn Webb, elevating craft

Born in New York’s Hudson Valley into the world of philanthropy and the daughter of an early director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aileen Osborn Webb (1892-1979) was, simply put, crafty. She loved painting and sculpture, but it was a humbler sort of handmade object that she favored. A potter, enamellist and woodcarver, Osborn saw in craft something essential about art and life, as well as a way for the poor to generate income during the Great Depression.

Her early efforts to support craftspeople included the founding of the School of the American Craftsman, Crafts Horizon magazine (still in publication, now known as American Craft), the Handcraft Cooperative League of America and America House, an exhibition and sales venue in Manhattan to present the works of extraordinary craftspeople from across the nation. But it was one of her final projects that might have had the most lasting effect on New York’s cultural landscape, when, in 1956, Aileen Osborn Webb founded the Museum of Art and Design.

Marcia Tucker, embracing the newer than new

After nearly a decade curating exhibitions at the ultra-progressive Whitney Museum, Brooklyn-born Marcia Tucker (1940-2006) wanted to do something even newer. It was time, she thought, for living, practicing artists to make meaningful inroads into the museum world. While galleries presented art for sale and museums enshrined works of historical significance, the public needed a place to see important exhibitions of the art of the moment. In 1977, she founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art at age 37.

Its beginning was scrappy—with ad hoc, sometimes borrowed spaces, shows of lesser-known artists and thorny topics like the economy, sexuality, AIDS and “Bad Painting.” For some time, it was rumored that Tucker was one of the anonymous masked feminist provocateurs of the art world, the Guerrilla Girls. Masked or not, she provoked, but the museum she founded has grown into an internationally revered source for challenging works by cutting-edge artists.

And the beat goes on

Whether by establishing quilting bees or building major museums, there have always been women who support art and artists. The trend is wider than the city of New York, and it’s a history still being written. Sisters Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt founded the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in 1897. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Boston museum opened in 1903. Mary Woodhouse founded East Hampton’s Guild Hall Museum in 1931. Alanna Heiss founded the Institute for Art and Urban Resources in 1971; it later became P.S. 1, part of MoMA. Wilhelmina Cole Holladay founded the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., in 1981. Alice Walton founded the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2005. In 2025, architect Maya Lin and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, with support from the Ford Foundation, will be responsible for reopening New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, and so it continues.

When thinking about a work of art, a central question has always been: “By whose hands?” But considering these women and the museums they built, it becomes apparent the answer is never as simple as it seems.

“There’s so much to be done in the whole field of 20th-century art history that has to do with focusing not so much on the artist but on the patrons, the workers, the art dealers, this whole complex multidimensional art world. Obviously, the artists are at the core and primary,” said Temkin, but “art history really is made up of so many more people than that, and I think that aspect of art history is ripe for more and more exploration.”