"The Businessman and Picasso": Narratives of Gender and the Modern Art Collector in the United States

Between the 1930s and 1960s a radical shift in US attitudes toward the collecting of modern art occurred. In my paper I will focus on how this reflects a re-gendering discourse of modern art collecting in the US, as narratives re-shaped existing gendered notions of the collector to establish collecting modern art as a respectable masculine endeavor. Re-gendering relates to collecting as an activity by which gender identity is expressed or marked (Belk 2002): men's collecting reflected their erudition and taste, or economic and social power; a woman’s collecting was synecdochal, related only to her personal identity (Tiersten, 1996; McCarthy, 1991, p 179), a low-outlay support for the "new" based upon relationships with artists, or a low prestige activity unable to sacralize collectors or their art (Chafe 1972; Amott and Matthei 1991; Bonvillan 2007). I argue that gendered attitudes to collectors affected not just the status of collectors but of modern art itself. Being identified with women collectors was seen as an obstacle to modernism achieving canonical status (Chamberlain, n.d, p 152, MoMA Archives). Collecting modern art had to be re-gendered into an activity embedded in, and signifying, the public sphere, legitimated for American businessmen by parallels drawn between entrepreneurial commerce and collecting modern art. Institutional presentations of businessmen or professionals as modern art collectors and business and mainstream media articles valorized modern art as signifying both its cultural capital and its monetary value, and led to the blue chip status of modern American art by the 1950s.