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Stories of forgotten female artists are uncovered by BYU students

Work of 441 women are on exhibit at BYU Museum of Art

Deseret News

Published: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 2:19 p.m. MST

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PROVO — It took 13 research students, a dedicated mentor and more than four years to find the hundreds of female artists thus far forgotten by history.

It also took a working combination of sheer luck and dogged determination.

But today, the paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, textiles and furniture of 441 women taught by Robert Henri, who is regarded at the most important American art teacher of the 20th century, can be seen at Brigham Young University's Museum of Art.

"At the outset, I just know that Henri taught a lot of women students and an exhibition created from the work of Henri's women students — a previously unstudied group — was a stimulating concept," said Marian Wardle, curator of the museum's American Art collection.

Wardle secured funding and hired a group of ambitious students who worked with graduate students from three other universities to uncover information about artists that include Utah muralist Minerva Teichert, Wardle's grandmother.

The students combed through Henri's personal letters, registration cards at the schools where Henri taught and hand-written ledger rolls from the turn of the 20th century.

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Some of the artists were listed only by their initials, so researchers had to determine, first of all, whether they were male or female.

Most of the women had married, some several times, so their names had changed.

"Once we got into this and were contacting museums, universities, art schools, government institutions, private collectors and family members, people started to contact us with information," Wardle said.

There was also a good amount of luck involved.

For example, the researchers had been looking for works by Margery Ryerson, the artist who compiled a popular textbook about Henri's philosophy.

Wardle could remember seeing an exhibition in 1987 but the exhibiting gallery had long since closed. Wardle had a brochure with the name of curator, whom she called, and as a result found the entire Ryerson estate collection.

Wardle said the list of Henri's female students will never be complete. There are no surviving records of his classes at the New York School of Art.

But the project and research results can serve as a springboard for others and along the way, and her team members gained a new appreciation for women artists and for Robert Henri.

"This landmark exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see work by important American women artists of the early 20th century," said Janet Wolff, associate dean of the School of Arts at Columbia University. "In recent years, museums and art historians have been re-evaluating and rediscovering the work of figurative and realist artists, who were often side-lined by the dominance of abstract and modernist art since the 1950s. This exhibition of work by women students of Robert Henri, the pre-eminent American realist painter, makes clear that it is not only male artists whose reinstatement is overdue."

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