Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art

The Fogg Art Museum presents a major exhibition examining the collection and life of Lois Orswell, a collector with a pioneering eye and a tenacious personality who was active from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. This exhibition will showcase approximately 180 works from Orswell’s collection of more than 350 European and American modernist paintings, sculptures, and drawings, as well as classical Asian, and African sculptures. This is the first time that these works will be shown as a cohesive group that includes art by Georges Seurat, Auguste Rodin, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Arshile Gorky, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, David Smith, and Willem de Kooning. After placing her collection on long-term, anonymous loan to the Fogg Art Museum around 1970, Orswell donated a number of these works over the next three decades, and bequeathed the remainder of the loaned works to the Fogg at her death in 1998.

A catalogue, containing correspondence between Orswell and artists represented in her collection, as well as letters to friends and dealers in the New York arts community, is also available.