Modern Women celebrates the arrival of twenty works of art to the Museum on indefinite loan from a private collection.

Historically marginalized in the art world, many of these artists’ careers, such as those of key Abstract Expressionists Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, were eclipsed by their husbands, Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning, as well as Sonia Delaunay and Françoise Gilot, whose careers were also overshadowed by the successes of their husbands, Robert Delaunay and Pablo Picasso.

Yet the contributions of women artists to the development of Modern and Contemporary art cannot be overstated. The variety of work spans scale, media, and artistic approach—from gestural brushwork, cerebral and meditative works on paper, to photography that questions our identities and popular culture. Intelligent, ironic, and often pushing established boundaries of subject and media, the works and the artists are as diverse and complex as the rapidly shifting centuries in which they were created.