Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, who used her social relationships, organizational acumen, and personal collection of hundreds of works by women painters to build the country’s first museum dedicated to women in the arts, died Saturday at her Washington home. She was 98 years old.
Her death was confirmed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, which she opened in 1987 and until recently chaired it and held weekly meetings with the museum’s director at her Georgetown home.
Ms. Holladay, known to her friends as Billie, was a skilled networker from Washington who understood how to use party invitations and nonprofit committee seats to create an agenda. But where others might have used those talents to solicit clients or gain power for their own sake, she had a different goal in mind: to include women in art history who she believed had ignored their contributions for too long .
A patrician with impeccable taste and sense of decency, she rubbed her shoulders with First Ladies, had lunch with Mellons and Gettys, and supported herself in the six years it took to open the museum, housed in a former Freemason , to those associations and others in Washington’s cultural establishment temple three blocks from the White House.
Under the direction of Ms. Holladay, the museum grew to include more than 5,500 works by more than 1,000 artists with an endowment of $ 66 million and a network of support committees in 13 states and 10 countries.
“No player in the art scene has a deeper understanding of power and money and how our system works,” wrote Paul Richard, Washington Post critic, when the museum opened. “Despite her white-gloved friendliness, hardworking Billie Holladay is a warrior and a winner.”
Wilhelmina Cole was born on October 2, 1922 in Elmira, New York State. Her father, Chauncey Cole, was a businessman; Her mother, Claire Elisabeth (Strong) Cole, was a housewife. She was particularly close to her maternal grandmother, who lived across the street and owned a print by French artist Rosa Bonheur.
She moved to Washington shortly after graduating from Elmira College in 1944. She got a job as a social secretary for the Chinese embassy; For a while she worked for Madame Chiang Kai-shek, China’s first lady, who had temporarily moved to the United States to campaign for international support against the Chinese communists.
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Ms. Holladay left the embassy after Wallace Jr. was born and shortly before the fall of the Chinese government. The family moved to the suburbs of McLean, Virginia and later to Georgetown.
She worked for a while in the National Gallery and later joined several museum and non-profit bodies. She and her husband also began collecting art: their first work was a painting they bought for $ 100 at a high school art fair.
On a trip to Europe in the 1970s, the Holladays were impressed by a still life by the Flemish artist Clara Peeters from the 17th century, which they experienced in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. They saw another Peeters in Madrid working at the Museo del Prado. But at home they couldn’t mention her in her many art-historical volumes.
“If Peeters was enough to hang in two of the greatest museums in the world, how was it that we didn’t know them?” Ms. Holladay wrote in her memoir “A Museum of Our Own” (2008).
She and her husband focused on female artists and ended up collecting 500 works by 150 painters and sculptors. But buying the works was one thing; What bothered Ms. Holladay was a general lack of awareness among women artists.
At dinner parties, she asked if anyone could name five female artists since the Renaissance. She would hear the names Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. Someone could mention Helen Frankenthaler. Nobody ever turned five.
Mrs. Holladay had planned to donate her collection to a museum. But one day at lunchtime, her friend Nancy Hanks, the first woman to run the National Foundation for the Arts, suggested going further. Not everyone had the skills and connections to open their own museum, Ms. Hanks said. But Mrs. Holladay did.
She turned out to be adept – and happy – at fundraising. Her neighbor was a granddaughter of J. Paul Getty; She gave $ 1 million. Ms. Holladay’s first gala in 1983 was directed by philanthropist Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny, and fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy. While she was working to save money on buying a building, she opened her home and collection to visitors, with her family and friends serving as lecturers.
“She was the master of the possible,” said Winton Holladay, her daughter-in-law, the museum’s vice-chairwoman. “She just had this incredible confidence, and her confidence permeated everyone else.”
For the location of the museum, Ms. Holladay chose the former national headquarters of the Masons, a looming neoclassical building on New York Avenue. The neighborhood was shabby; There was an adult bookstore next door. But she reveled in the irony: a “bastion of a male secret society,” she said of the Freemasons, would now be used to promote women in the arts.
The museum opened on April 7, 1987 in the presence of Barbara Bush, then the second lady. Despite the support of the Washington establishment, the institution was immediately criticized from all sides: feminists claimed that artists were being ghettoized, while conservatives claimed that the museum politicized art.
Mrs. Holladay was unmoved. When raising funds for the museum, she pointed out that only 2 percent of the art purchased by major museums was from women. By the mid-2010s, that number had only improved slightly to 11 percent. And as the museum’s collection expanded, criticism subsided.
“She had the guts of her beliefs and knew what she wanted to do,” said Susan Fisher Sterling, the museum’s longtime director. “She would say to people, ‘You are absolutely right. It would be wonderful if women artists were treated equally. But they are not. ‘”
