She Changed How We See Women in Art: Inside the Sybil Shainwald Collection | Sotheby’s

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]You don't expect to see all of this in one collection.

[00:00:07]Magritte's painted wine bottle, Tanning's dreamlike figures, Matisse, Picasso, Tauber Arp, Bontecou, [music] Lang.

[00:00:18]It's a museum quality sweep of modernism through abstraction, assembled out of a deep passion for the arts. This is the collection of Sybil [music] Shainwald.

[00:00:34]Sybil was not your typical collector.

[00:00:37]I was lucky enough to call her a friend.

[00:00:40]She was a pioneering lawyer and devoted champion for women, [music] taking on pharmaceutical companies and rewriting the story of women's health.

[00:00:49]>> [music] >> And her beloved husband, Sydney Shainwald, was supportive of her career, something that she found in common with her friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was also disarmingly warm. [music] Her favorite line was, "Would you like to come for breakfast, lunch, or dinner?"

[00:01:04]And she was the consummate host. We shared many lunches together surrounded by her art collection.

[00:01:12]Sybil loved supporting female artists.

[00:01:14]Conveniently, they were more affordable at the time of acquisition, but that also marked a clear problem in the market to assemble. So, here we see excellent and rare examples by artists whose work [music] she championed long before the market caught up, which I think shows you the eye of a great collector. She paid close [music] attention to how figures were portrayed, whether bold and self-assured like in the Matisse, for example, or playful and of course surreal like the Magritte.

[00:01:44]This Magritte in particular, Femme Bouteille, was one of Sybil's favorites.

[00:01:48]She actually lost out on a similar bottle at auction [music] and was furious with herself. It was the one that got away. So, she went back and said, if someone goes to Belgium, can they find me another? Months later, she gets a call. It's important to know here that Magritte had painted around 25 of these bottles.

[00:02:07]She goes in and picked out this one.

[00:02:09][music] It's a painted female figure wrapped around a wine bottle. During the war, when materials were scarce, Magritte started using his spare wine bottles and painting in the round, if you will. [music] Turning something ordinary into surreal sculpture.

[00:02:27]Then there's Dorothea Tanning's Tame Wine True Dram, Witnesses to the Drama.

[00:02:32]Painted in 1947 [music] when she and Max Ernst were in the Arizona desert. It looks, at first, like a domestic [music] interior. But, the more you look, the stranger it gets. It feels like walking into a room where something has just happened or maybe is about to. This sense [music] that there's more going on here than the eye can easily recognize.

[00:02:55]>> [music] >> Then you turn and find Matisse's Femme Nue.

[00:02:59]And a reclining Picasso with a bird.

[00:03:02]This classical language of the nude, yes. But, here they feel [music] less like passive ideals and more like bodies with their own gravity, their own charge.

[00:03:12]Tauber Arp's composition is precise.

[00:03:14]It's abstract. It's structure and balance. And it speaks to Sibyl's instinct for backing artists who weren't yet fully recognized. [music] The same is true for Lee Bontecou's Untitled, executed around 1961.

[00:03:28]It comes from this moment Bontecou was [music] pushing painting far beyond its surface and creating two-dimensional works that still feel sculptural.

[00:03:36]Examples like this one are incredibly rare.

[00:03:41]We turn the corner and we meet two women as captured through the lens of two of the most important women photographers.

[00:03:47]>> [music] >> Lange's Migrant Mother evokes so much emotion within one [music] small frame.

[00:03:58]You have just this powerful feeling of >> [music] >> love emanating from the mother. It is an icon of photography. It's an icon of 20th century American [music] history.

[00:04:11]Cindy Sherman's film stills is a series that she undertook between 1977 and 1980. [music] They hearken back to noir, mid-century film, and they really trade on [music] stereotypes, on archetypes of women. In this image, I feel that you see the woman [music] who is maybe pondering her life. She is acting. It is performative.

[00:04:33][music] Cindy Sherman herself is the star of her photographs.

[00:04:40]Civil showed remarkable foresight as a collector, >> [music] >> acquiring Diane Arbus's a box of 10 photographs before the market even fully recognized photography's [music] power.

[00:04:51]That it remained her favorite underscores both its importance and the [music] lasting emotional force of Arbus's unflinching, intimate portraits.

[00:05:04]If you look at the collection as a whole, it's a collection that is assertive, and they're not artworks that are loud or are large or [music] even imposing. They're significant because they're gems by each of these artists.

[00:05:21][music] And sometimes the works that speak the loudest are actually the ones that are the most intimate.