The Curator Championing Female Abstract Expressionists in Mayfair
Phoebe Caird has spent two decades unearthing canvases that history preferred to bury. Her Mount Street gallery hang brings together Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Krasner, and lesser-known figures such as Ethel Schwabacher and Fay Lansworthy. The exhibition reads as both correction and celebration, positioning women at the centre of a movement long narrated as the exclusive domain of Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko.
Mayfair's association with capital and global collecting makes it a charged stage for this revisionism. The gallery, once a discreet space for Victorian watercolours, is now a research-driven operation with conservation partnerships. Visitors expecting polite interiors find gutsy gestures once dismissed as decorative — language, as Caird argues, that was shorthand for feminine work.
The thesis is direct: Abstract Expressionism was never only a boys' club, and its women practitioners navigated the same Cedar Tavern meetings, shared the same studios, and absorbed the same postwar anxieties. Caird insists that canonical literature, written largely by male critics in the 1950s, simply failed to look hard enough. Her selection includes Michi Itami and Perle Fine alongside Britons working in St Ives's wake.
Australia has quietly become an important market. Caird notes that Sydney and Melbourne buyers have been enthusiastic early respondents, with collectors from Mosman and Melbourne's inner suburbs snapping up works. Australian institutions have built long-term loans, and the campaign parallels Australia's own reckoning around under-recognised women, from the Heidelberg School to contemporary Aboriginal artists.
A Forgotten Generation of Painters
The exhibition opens with a wall text reading like a roll call of lost commissions. Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Joan Herndon, Grace Hartigan each worked in the shadow of better-known husbands or mentors and produced canvases that today stand beside the movement's most expensive lots. Caird points to the gendered assumptions that rendered domestic scale and lyrical colour "minor" by default, treating them as curatorial problems to be dismantled.
The hang is chronological, beginning with late-1940s automatism and ending with the cooler, harder-edged paintings of the mid-1960s. Audio interviews from the artists' estates sit beside the canvases, adding an archival quality. Visitors returning for the second hour tend to walk more slowly.
The Mayfair Revival
Mayfair's gallery map has shifted, with heavyweight dealers moving south from Cork Street and international outposts opening near Bond Street. Her landlord is a discreet Mayfair institution that once housed an antiquarian bookshop; the tall north-facing windows suit the large-scale canvases she favours. Regional UK museums now route study trips through the space as preparation for any serious acquisition policy.
Wealthy collectors from Singapore, São Paulo and Lausanne share viewing rooms with fashion houses borrowing pieces for editorial features. Caird's team capitalises on this crossover with small, members-only dinners around each new acquisition — a strategy borrowed from the celebrity-driven calendar that dominates Los Angeles and Aspen. The gallery offers private tours to visiting stylists and editors.
Australian Audiences and the New Wave
The south-Pacific market has been quieter than headlines suggest but has steadily accumulated interest in female abstraction. Galleries in Sydney's Woollahra and Melbourne's Armadale have built small but influential client bases, often bringing visitors to London during the summer sales. Caird sees these collectors as unusually patient, willing to wait for the right canvas rather than compete at headline auctions.
A handful of Australian buyers have joined the gallery's advisory board, contributing essays to forthcoming catalogues. Caird has accepted invitations to speak at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and to host a private dinner during Sydney Contemporary, treating both as essential parts of the market's rebuild. She also points to parallels between female New York abstraction and Australia's own neglected women, including the Heidelberg School matriarchs and postwar modernists of Adelaide and Perth.
Blockbuster Auctions and the Price Gap
The market for these painters has shifted sharply over the past decade. Mitchell's "Blueberry" sold for just over 16 million pounds at Christie's in 2018, while a Schwabacher canvas of comparable ambition can still be acquired for a fraction of that figure. The disparity reflects biography, estate management, and the brutal arithmetic of scarcity, but it reveals how a single dominant narrative can flatten a market. Auction outcomes are shaped as much by competitive status-seeking and fan reactions as by intrinsic quality.
| Artist | Typical Mayfair Asking Price (2024) | Highest Auction Result | Years Active |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joan Mitchell | £2.4m – £18m | £16.4m (2018) | 1950–1992 |
| Helen Frankenthaler | £1.8m – £14m | £12.6m (2019) | 1952–2002 |
| Lee Krasner | £1.4m – £9.5m | £7.8m (2021) | 1937–1984 |
| Ethel Schwabacher | £120k – £620k | £1.1m (2022) | 1945–1983 |
| Grace Hartigan | £90k – £540k | £680k (2020) | 1948–2008 |
| Fay Lansworthy | £45k – £180k | £210k (2017) | 1949–1981 |
Such pricing compels Australian collectors to look harder at the second tier. At roughly AUD 220,000, a strong Hartigan looks enormously tempting to a Sydney buyer weighing the same outlay against a mid-tier Australian contemporary. Mayfair pricing has become a study in narrative value rather than intrinsic worth.
Programme Highlights
The 2025 calendar includes a Lee Krasner retrospective in February, a Mary Abbott survey in May, and a panel on women's estate management in October. Each show comes with a scholarly catalogue and restored archival footage where possible. Caird has commissioned new essays from Australian art historians, including one on the postwar women modernists of Adelaide and Perth.
A short season of evening talks will be live-streamed for international audiences. Caird argues that remote access is no longer optional for a gallery with global ambitions; her team is trialling simultaneous translation into Mandarin and Japanese.
How Acquisitions Are Reshaping the Canon
Momentum matters as much as money. The National Gallery of Australia has begun conversations about a long-term loan, and Tate's curatorial team has visited twice in the past twelve months. When state collections take a position, the secondary market typically follows within two seasons. Caird is candid about the lag, noting that connoisseurship rarely outpaces fashion for long.
The gallery will publish its first annual report next spring, tracking institutional acquisitions and the new collections entering major museums. It is part accountability exercise, part marketing — a recognition that the abstract expressionist canon will only be rewritten when the great collections themselves begin to rewrite theirs.
Bookings for the Lee Krasner opening open in early January, with priority lists reserved for past buyers and institutional partners. The show runs until late March, aligning neatly with Sydney Contemporary and Melbourne Art Week, so visitors can combine a Mayfair viewing with back-to-back programming at home. Subscribe to the gallery's quarterly publication for first refusal on the Krasner paintings before they enter the public sales rooms, and enquire directly about private viewings for serious collectors working in Australian dollars.