by Pauline Adamek
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Revelation Perth International Film Festival
Cast:
Ginny Williams
Intro:
... intimate ...
Danish filmmaker Flemming Fynsk’s documentary The Art Whisperer focuses on a pioneering collector of women artists, Ginny Williams (1927–2019). Produced posthumously by her daughter Elle Williams, the intimate film celebrates Ginny’s influence in the modern art world of the mid 20th century through casual interviews captured on camera when she was 91.
A transformative American art collector, photographer, gallery founder, and philanthropist, Ginny is described by various art experts as having “an intuitive and open, extremely sensitive relationship with the world.” Others observe, “Ginny pursued what she loved. If she likes it, that’s enough.”
Open to finding new voices, she appears to have been guided by an infallible sense of intuition. “She’s got it. Her eye is like a divining rod,” Ginny agrees. “I think it’s a calling, almost,” adding that “art is whoever receives it. It’s different for everyone. When you get down to [what makes it] a good painting, it’s that I think is a good painting. Is it the brushstrokes or does it appeal? I don’t know. You just know or you don’t. I have a hard time describing what’s good and what isn’t.”
She slightly bristles at the accuracy and importance of her influence. “It’s a completely false concept in the art world. If they think I bought it, then they’ll buy it. Must be worth it.” Yet at other times, she seems acutely aware of her influence. “It just seemed like everything I did made money.” She later addresses the question whether she is a collector or a dealer, claiming, “I’m not a collector, I just absorb things. I had a gallery, so I was selling stuff. The gallery never made a dime.”
Many of the laid-back interviews are conducted as she potters about in her garden, and the camera follows her through her sprawling, bright ranch-style Santa Fe home full of modern masterpieces.
We learn that she was an amateur political photographer, married to a Colorado State Senator and one of the pioneers of cable television. Divorced and left with no money, she starts her own gallery in Denver. In the ‘80s. She would buy things she liked and selected a lot of work of women photographers. An early promoter of women artists, she states, “I didn’t care that they were women, I just liked their work.” She is reverently spoken of as a partial patron for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Loaning her Georgia O’Keefe landscape for an exhibition in New York, she casually mentions it has been estimated at “$1 million 5.”
Conceptual artists such as Ann Hamilton remark how “Ginny recognised the place that the work comes from, which is not necessarily the subject of the work.”
There’s no denying that capturing the eye of Ginny Williams becomes your ticket to fame. We learn that sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ career skyrocketed following an exhibition at Ginny’s gallery in Denver, which is instrumental in Louise becoming known to a wider audience. Many now famous names such as Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, Ann Hamilton, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, Alice Neel, Diane Arbus, Tina Modotti, Dorothea Lange and Helen Frankenthaler all benefitted from her interest in, and promotion of, their art works.
After her passing in September 2019 at age 92, her collection of 450+ works was auctioned in 2020 across several high-profile Sotheby’s sales, with calculations that the collection’s worth exceeded $50 million.
Ginny Williams reshaped the art world, using her keen eye and passion to elevate female artists and photographers to prominence. Her Denver gallery, museum board memberships, and stellar collection cement her as a trailblazing patron whose impact resonates to this day.
