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This paper describes the early days of the Women’s Art Collection at �鶹Ƶ��, previously known as the New Hall Art Collection. It focuses on the extraordinary act of giving by women artists which resulted in the Collection opening with over 80 works by 69 artists in 1992. The Collection has grown since then, to nearly 600 works which are displayed all around the �鶹Ƶ�� in the University of Cambridge and act as an inspiration to those who live and work in and visit the College. I am particularly grateful to those who gave up their time to be interviewed for this work. They were Professor Griselda Pollock (art historian), Ann Jones (curator), Sara Holdsworth (curator and daughter of Valerie Pearl, College President 1981-1995), Elsa Strietman (Fellow Emerita), Krystyna Stevenson (widow of Christopher Stevenson, College Bursar) and Marilyn Kyle (artist), and for permission to include comments from other Fellows Emeritae. Professor Lucy Delap gave valuable guidance on taking oral histories. I have also drawn on an essay by the College’s curator Harriet Loffler and material in the College archives.

Background: the founding of the College

�鶹Ƶ�� was founded as New Hall in 1954, with a fledgling cohort of thirteen students and two tutors, just six years after Cambridge University formally admitted women into degrees. Initially housed in the building that is now Darwin College, the College moved in 1965 into landmark building designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon1 , who went on to design the Barbican Centre in London. The architects and founding President Dame Rosemary Murray had a vision of a building that reached for the sky and this emphasis on ascension is felt across the soaring architecture and iconic Dome. When the College first moved into its new building, there were, of course, many yards of bare walls. The College filled some of these with works loaned from the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Arts Council Collection but although there were some very good works, they were almost all by men.

1986: Mary Kelly – artist in residence at New Hall and Kettle’s Yard

The first turning point towards a collection of works by women artist was when the President and Fellows invited the leading American feminist artist Mary Kelly to be artist-in-residence in 1985-86, in collaboration with nearby Kettle’s Yard. The College acquired Extase that Mary Kelly made during her time in Cambridge, part of a much larger body of work titled Interim (1984–89).2 Interim explores the identity of women in their middle years and the difference between the social construction of woman-as-object and how she experiences herself. Interim has four themes: Corpus (Body), Pecunia (Money), Historia (History) and Potentas (Power) of which Extase forms part of Corpus, the first of the series. Mary Kelly when interviewed in 20153 commented: 

“Not a lot was known about contemporary art by everyone so the magical thing was the way that women came together round the subject matter [of my work] and then became interested in the issues of contemporary art”. 

Indeed, Sara Holdsworth described how Mary Kelly won the Fellows over: “They [the Fellows] were initially very suspicious. I think a lot of people thought contemporary art was kind of a con, particularly conceptual art. But Mary was an inspired choice because she won them around because she was so interested in academic things. And they were very surprised to realize that her kind of research was a lot of it book-based. I think they expected an artist to come into lunch in a paint-spattered smock. She was incredibly curious about their academic research and her interests were very wide-ranging and not just feminism, psychoanalytic theory, but all sorts of historical things about women as well. So I think that was a real change in attitudes. And I think her presence, she was very kind, witty and great company and she was in college a lot which made a huge difference, her actual physical presence. I think her subject matter for that particular work, which was about childbirth and the process of childbirth and bringing up young children in a personal as well as a political and academic way really resonated with Fellows because they were this first generation or maybe second generation of women academics who had families as a matter of course and were doing their academic work and bringing up children at the same time. And so there was a lot for them to recognize in the work on the personal level, as well as an intellectual one.”

1991-1992: the beginning of a collection of works by women artists

During that time, Mary Kelly developed a close friendship with the College President Valerie Pearl who became the inspirational driving force behind the development of a collection of art by women artists. However, Pearl’s interest in contemporary art had started well before her time in Cambridge. As her daughter Sara Holdsworth describes: 

“Well, in terms of the art collection, her ideas came from her time at UCL as Professor of History because she was great friends with the artists at the Slade [School of Fine Art]. That was really because there was a huge coffee room at UCL and after lunch every day, the Slade staff plus a few other mainly Professors of the arts, some scientists as well, would gather and chat and it was a kind of self-appointed club - there were a whole lot of artsy London academics who sat round, including practicing artists and that's what made it unusual.” 

However the actual idea of the Collection developed in 1991 as a result of conversations between Valerie Pearl and Ann Jones, an art curator who was living in College as the wife of one of the junior fellows. Ann recalls: 

"I remember going to a dinner about fundraising for the college and the fundraiser was asking did anybody know anybody wealthy who could help with fundraising and I thought, well, I don't really know anybody who could help with that, but I did know a lot of artists. And also at the back of my mind, I had been thinking it was really strange that it was a women's college and yet, all of the works of art in the Dome and in the different common rooms were all by male artists. So I said to Valerie “Well, what about approaching some artists to see whether artists would be interested in donating works to the College”, thinking, not for works to be donated to be sold, but to be part of the living environment and enrich the lives of those living and studying there. 

So Valerie said “Oh that seems an interesting idea, leave it with me” and the following weekend I think she said “I've had a chat with Sara and I think that's a very good idea”, so she said “Do you want to think of some names to approach?” So we wrote a letter [to around 15 artists]. The two key things that we did want to emphasize was the fact that it was a women's college and that was the context for it. There’d be work by women on the walls in a women’s college and that these works 4 would have a permanent home. Secondly, that they weren't intended for an auction or sale. 

So the letter went off from Valerie and I think it was at the next weekend or the weekend after I had a note in my pigeonhole summoning me to the President's Lodge on the Saturday morning. ‘Could I come and talk to her?’ And she said, “I've heard back from all of the artists apart from one” and I think they were all positive. Then she said “Do you want to think of some more names?”. So I went off and thought of some more names and made another list. 

This was the modest, almost casual beginning of an extraordinary act of donation in 1991 and 1992. Ann provided a list of around 100 artists who all received letters which included: “We feel strongly that women students should be able to study in a stimulating environment and to experience ideas outside their chosen areas of study”. The letter also guaranteed “that the work would not be sold and would remain on view as a source of inspiration to students, researchers and visitors”. This resulted in over 70 works being donated into what became the New Hall Art Collection. Sarah Cawkwell wrote: 

I’m honoured knowing that you have asked ‘eminent artists’. I have to say that I don’t quite put myself in that category – yet! However in the hope that some of the eminence contained on the walls of New Hall will rub off onto one of my pictures, I won’t hesitate. I would love to give the college something. 

And Vivien Blackett wrote: 

“Thank you for the letter which I was flattered to receive – I never think of myself as a prominent woman artist and would be happy to donate a work” Others were less happy to offer a work, sometimes pointing out the need for artists to earn a living. This is something of which the College was and still is acutely aware. While it has occasionally been possible to buy works through the generosity of donors, the majority of works in the Collection have been donated by the artists themselves. 

The job of physically collecting the works from the artists was given to Christopher Stevenson, College Bursar at the time. It was before works were routinely transported by art handlers (which anyway the College couldn’t afford). As Krysytna, Christopher’s widow recalls: 5 We used to pick up the pictures in our car in the boot if they were small enough to fit. If not Christopher used to go to the Histon Road petrol station and hired a van according to the size of the picture, I was his mate, helping him on many, many occasions so I met artists personally which was delightful….we went to Wales to Evelyn Williams to get that ‘All Through the Night’ in an enormous lorry, and again to Wales to get the ‘Homage to Miro’ - we went that to West Wales to get that. The only one that we had paid for being transported was from Edinburgh – there were four big panels and we didn't want to drive to Edinburgh and back. That was the only one that was bought by a courier.

A significant act of donation

The act of donation in 1991 and 1992 speaks not only of the generosity of the artists, but also of a desire to be represented at a time when women artists were largely overlooked by museums and galleries. These artists were given a platform and a voice. Marilyn Kyle, an artist who was at the opening exhibition recalls: 

I came out as a painter [in 1982] but with loads of questions hanging over me. There was this constant question and I've seen other people say it in different ways, but there was a sense that if you were a woman, you couldn't be a painter. And if you're a painter, you couldn't be a woman. I mean, it sounds odd to say it now, but it was real, it was really real. 

Professor Grizelda Pollock had challenged the ways in which women artists – prominent in art history writings from the 16th to 19th centuries – had been erased from art history in the 20th century. She comments: 

If it was so easy to find records of women’s creativity in the visual arts, the question was not ‘Why are there no great women artists?’ because they're clearly have been lots. Instead we [Pollock and Rozsika Parker] asked: ‘Why has art history in the 20th century erased their existence, suppressed this knowledge, and written art ‘s history exclusively in the masculine, only sometimes referencing a few women as ‘exceptions’ to the absence of female genius and often only to denigrate these women for ‘lacking originality and power’ in their ‘feeble, decorative and derivative’ works?’ ….. At the very point at which women gained access to education, political 6 emancipation, access to the professions and a degree of economic independence, art history becomes so overtly exclusionary of women. 

Pollock comments that while some women artists dislike the label of ‘woman artist’, bringing together the creativity of works created by women is an essential part of reversing the neglect that the 20th century has bestowed on women artists: 

My feminist generation said to the modern artists who did not want to be labelled women at all, Gillian Ayres, Barbara Hepworth, Bridget Riley, you are all wonderful, but you may not be preserved in the history of art unless we undertake this inquiry, this inquest, into why, in your very presence, your life-times, so many artists like you have been side-lined simply because they were women’. [the Collection has acquired major works by both Ayres and Hepworth] 

Professor Marina Warner drew out the same theme – the growing understanding of the significance of women artists. In her 1992 introduction to the first catalogue of the Collection, she makes a comparison with Novella who, when giving lectures in place of law professor father in the fourteenth century ‘had a little curtain drawn in front of her’. Warner writes: 

Women as authors aren’t veiled any longer – this has been one of the marked developments of the last decade. The curtains have been drawn aside to reveal the woman as she speaks, writes, paints …… in the field of the visual arts landmark exhibitions like the one held in Los Angeles in 1979 revealed the extent of women’s practice. 

Warner continues: 

The remarkable quality of the New Hall Collection … sems to me to point at a crucial shift that is happening in symbolic utterance and representation: women’s bodies, women’s nature have long been ‘good to think with’, their flesh has served artists as founts of meaning, allegorical and personal. More sensitive contemporary artists know that they cannot produce imagery in this way any longer. On the evidence of many current shows, young male artists appear to have ceded the territory which they occupied for so long ……. By contrast women move into this now contested territory of meaning with assurance and inspiration

The opening show – September 1992

The Collection, “Women’s Art at New Hall”, opened with a show of 84 works by 69 artists. The works exhibited are listed at the end of this paper. Professor Pollock expanded on her ideas and on their wider significance in the context of a Cambridge college in the speech which she gave at the opening: 

I want to draw out the vital significance of a collection of art by women artists being housed in a women’s college in Cambridge…. These varied arts must be collected to stand as testimony to coming generations of women, arriving here eager to be the crème de la crème. For these young and probably influential women, it will be an inspiration and political necessity to study surrounded by an art collection that can in all its diversity counter the blank page of women’s absence from the histories, law books, literatures, sciences, philosophies they will normally study for their degrees.

The show in was designed as an expression of gratitude for the many donations that formed the start of the Women’s Art Collection. The President, Valerie Pearl wrote in her invitation to the opening exhibition “I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the artists. We are honoured in the knowledge that it is precisely because New Hall is a college devoted to the higher education of women that we have been so singularly and richly endowed”. 

It was certainly a unique event, attended by many of the artists who had donated their works, of whom 35 came to the two day opening. The event was unusual, not least for those with stereotypes of what art at a Cambridge college would be like. As Marilyn Kyle describes: 

So I’m walking up to this modern block of a place thinking ‘Oh, that wasn’t quite what I was expecting’. First impression was ‘Have I come to the right place?’ – Yes it definitely says New Hall College. I’ve got really vivid memories, vivid visual memories of it, the light brickiness of it and the fact that you walked in and there was this art. This feeling of wandering along corridors looking at art work …… But apart from the visual impact of the place and the work, it was all these women together who were predominantly artists. You know, it was like finding Christmas, all the goodies under the tree all at once. Going back to where I started, this sense of “I couldn’t actually be one of these people called painters because I was a 8 woman”, I got this feeling that you didn’t have to ask permission….. just amazing and unexpected. 

Of the importance of bringing together this community of artists, Griselda Pollock comments: 

One of the key aspects about the New Hall Collection is … that the collection brings together a group of 20th and 21st century artists who offer to viewers a variety of ways of being very interested in the main questions of art making while contributing variety and complexity to those questions, whether it's in sculpture or painting as figuration or abstraction, as time-or photo-based. Since the exhibition is artist-donated, it is also a monument to the creation of singular collection determined not by a pre-ordained canon or model of art’s current history. It inscribes each artist’s sense of what matters to them as creative people thinking about the world through making. 

She continues later: 

In the case of those who volunteered to be in your collection, they were happy to be seen in a community of women, not as examples of woman, but in a community of all these women individuals. Even as donation means the artists forfeit sales fees that they need to continue to make art, this method means that the collection is generated by artists and is generating something not dictated by a pre-existing protocol. In itself, it becomes a document of its own history.

Dramatic impact and long term significance

Sara Holdsworth recalls the early days of life at New Hall: 

I think my mother thought and the Fellows thought it [the building] was very austere …. architecturally. Again, hard to think yourself back to that period, but the architecture was very unpopular among those people. Not among architects, but among the Fellows certainly very, very unpopular. They hated this - as they thought of it - a pale lavatorial brick. So much that in the fellows dining room, they acquired these mock medieval ‘virgin in the garden’ type tapestries, which covered the walls. it was not just there was nothing on the walls (there wasn't) but it was physically cold as well. And I think it wasn't until the art started rolling in, as it did, 9 that my mother and the other Fellows realised, actually, it made an enormous difference what you had on the walls. It didn't have to be prettiness or decoration - there could be some other larger point to the Collection. 

The building had indeed suffered from its early years and large parts of the original underfloor heating had broken down by the 1990s. As Elsa Strietman recalls: You have to remember that in those years, the corridors, the spaces were rather dank, were rather grey, rather dark. The college in my early memory was distinguished by very cold places where buckets caught water - drips everywhere. We sat on the floor in the Fellows Drawing Room on its beautiful Persian carpet because on the floor was the only place where you really got warm because in that room the underfloor heating worked …. it was a grey place, and I found that very hard. [The pictures we had before] were not colourful enough and also they were often the sort of pictures where you really had to, you know, etchings and things you had to stand in front of them and look and see what was happening. But as you know, so much of our present artwork is quite literally eye-catching, you know - you cannot not see it, as it were. 

The art collection dramatically improved the outward appearance of the College as described by a number of Fellows Emeritae: 

The Zing that it gave, it was fantastic (Elsa Strietman) 

It made a huge difference to the look and feel of the College (Penny Wilson) 

Hatty Harris describes how “It felt like a real landmark moment for the College…. It was the first statement of what the College was about”. 

So not only was the College visually transformed by the early and subsequent additions to the Collection, the art also became an important statement of the College’s purpose in celebrating the achievements of women and inspiring the generations of students who would live and work in College. 

The Collection has never had a gallery: rather the works – now numbering nearly 600 – are distributed all around the College so that students, staff and visitors are immersed in and stimulated by the work wherever they are in the College buildings. Griselda Pollock again: 

A collection needs to be read and re-read. It is wonderful that these works are the aesthetic fabric of your students’ daily lives, infusing these artists’ visions into their work, sleep and relaxation. But the full meaning of each work as index of an 10 entire career and project, and of the collection that is being made by donations, needs interpretation inspiring research, provoking debate, deepening our understanding of what is happening in art now…. A collection like the New Hall Collection has a very strategic role to play in Cambridge, in Britain and internationally. I am very proud to have been invited to write about it, to speak at its launch, to support it in 2021 and to talk with you now not about fond memories of the launch weekend, so much as about my deepening understanding of its significance and long-term role. 

Martin Roland, Emeritus Fellow �鶹Ƶ��, University of Cambridge. April 2022