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Its guiding principles are beyond reproach. Its latest show is extraordinary. Yet the Museum of Women's Art still lacks a permanent home. John Henshallresents an enduring affront
It would be gratifying to be able to state that the Museum of Women's Art project, founded nearly ten years ago by a group of passionately committed individuals, is thriving and achieving all its hopes and dreams. But, sadly, it is not. If anything, through no fault of any of those involved, the MWA is at a low point at present.
One might have thought that its stated aims - "to recover, portray and celebrate the work of women artists [in] the belief that women throughout history have suffered disadvantage and discrimination" - were straightforward and easily attainable in so wealthy a country as ours. However, as of this summer, the MWA has been all but temporarily scuppered, and it's all about money.
The MWA wants to establish a permanent gallery, museum or other exhibition space where guests can stand and stare and writers and scholars research. To date, one application to a major London funding provider has been rejected and what the MWA was assured was an almost fail-safe, "superbly prepared" Heritage Lottery Fund bid was also turned down.
The MWA's plight puts me in mind of the British Archive of Outsider Art, currently at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The MWA had identified suitable premises in King's Cross, central London; the BAOA did so in Spitalfields, east London. Neither could raise the necessary cash. Yet we shall have a hugely expensive Millennium Dome. Such are current priorities in an insecure, dispirited nation.
For seven years, the MWA has put on fine shows on a "gallery without walls" basis, using other people's spaces, and there has been no shortage of willing helpers. Highlights have included two superb exhibitions of Jewish women's art. One told the horror story of Charlotte Salomon. Salomon foresaw the obscenities the second world war would bring, so produced her visual autobiography in the form of some 1,300 gouaches. She left them with a French doctor friend: "Will you take care of this? It is my whole life." Around 750 gouaches survived but Salomon did not. In 1943 she was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, aged 26, newly married and pregnant.
An exhibition by the neglected pre-Raphaelite Evelyn de Morgan rehabilitated an entire reputation. People could at last view the works of a highly prolific artist who died in 1916 but who in 1996 still had just five works in public collections. Several ridiculous myths were debunked and, extraordinarily, these had been invented by her younger sister, who outlived her by all of 46 years.
There has been disappointment. A show by the largely overlooked arts and crafts artist Phoebe Anne Traquair, timed to coincide with the William Morris centenary three years ago, had to be axed when lenders imposed security requirements the MWA simply could not meet. However, there have been talks, lectures and seminars around the UK, and many estimable women artists whose work had lain hidden for decades have been traced and documented. A large photographic archive has been assembled. Volunteers at the MWA's small central London office have been helped by keen interns, several from American universities. Now two of the "main" founders, Monica Petzal and Belinda Harding, have decided change is needed. Another long-standing MWA supporter, Barbara Grundy, is easing herself in as chair. Grundy runs Contemporary Arts and brings wide art-world and business experience and contacts.
The MWA's 1999 exhibition is already in the bag. It feat-ures tortured, haunted Cynthia Pell, who suffered psychiatric problems all her short life and died at 44 in 1977 after nearly 15 years at St Bernard's Hospital at Southall, Middlesex, many of them on a locked ward. Pell was of Central European and Russian descent and grew up in Finchley, north London. She studied art at Bournemouth, then at Camberwell. Early on she was married, briefly, to the jazz musician and painter Ron Weldon. She seemed addicted to controversial and often catastrophic experiences: in the exhibition catalogue her sister, Barbara Pell, gives us an insight into a confused and hell-wracked soul: "In 1957 Cynthia had an exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London [she was 24] and afterwards, on the pavement outside, she destroyed [burned, in fact] many of the paintings." Her sister says Cynthia became increasingly "a frightening person". She had no more shows during her lifetime, and we hear an increasingly nightmarish story of bedsits, drugs, agitprop and hospitals.
Pell's paintings were frequently astonishing - hallucinatory yet mesmeric doom visions and freak shows from who knows what nether realms. They reflect her acknowledged frustration at mental and physical suffering, and her sympathy for those forever unable "to break out of their shells".
I spent an afternoon talking with Barbara Grundy. If one person can help put the MWA back on track and where it belongs on the art map, it could well be her. She speaks the language of commerce fluently, and this will be crucial in her foremost task: to start some real, major-league fundraising. "We need new beneficiaries," she says, "but it [the MWA] must have the right product, one they can really believe in. So I shall try to rejig and re-tweak it. We may be slightly bowed but we aren't bloodied. We shan't be, either. I'll do my damnedest to see to that."
"Cynthia Pell" runs at Orleans House Gallery, Riverside, Twickenham TW1 3DJ (0181-892 0221) from 11July to 5 September. A fully illustrated catalogue is available. To contact the MWA call 0171-251 4881, and Barbara Grundy, 0171-730 6407/0533
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