{"id":324573,"date":"2025-12-01T19:00:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T19:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/324573\/"},"modified":"2025-12-01T19:00:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T19:00:13","slug":"incredible-collector-ginny-williams-celebrated-in-the-art-whisperer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/324573\/","title":{"rendered":"Incredible Collector Ginny Williams Celebrated In ‘The Art Whisperer’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLouise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell and more \u2013 some of the greatest artists of recent times owe something to one person, art collector Ginny Williams<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore the art establishment recognized the talent of these women, Williams discerned it and bought their work. Eventually, her taste became so renowned that if she bought an artist, other collectors followed suit, boosting prices for painters and sculptors who might otherwise have remained undervalued and under-appreciated.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe collected these women when no one took notice,\u201d says Flemming Fynsk<\/a>, director of The Art Whisperer<\/a>, the Oscar-contending documentary about Williams. \u201cRoni Horn, for instance, she was instrumental really for her; Ann Hamilton, she\u2019s a major artist now. But also Joan Mitchell for instance, and she sought these people out. She would befriend them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRemarkably, as the film explores, Williams didn\u2019t begin collecting until she turned 60, after a divorce that left her without any financial resources.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Ginny<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tGinny Williams with Louise Bourgeois<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLove Today Productions<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe was a dutiful wife, as she says, and she was committed to it. So, she sacrificed her life for her husband. But then when he left, she just followed her passion, what she loved,\u201d Fynsk says, noting Williams eventually amassed a collection of 450 pieces that included work by Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, the largest collection of Louise Bourgeois\u2019 sculptures in private hands and photography by Robert Mapplethorpe, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Ruth Bernhard and others. The value? Inestimable.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe just happened to make a lot of money out of that. But it was never about how much it was or what your name was,\u201d Fynsk observes. \u201cShe was fascinated by everything; [even] a cheap piece of art like the one she bought at the Denver Fair was as valuable to her as the Helen Frankenthaler.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Ginny Williams eye. Nothing seemed to escape her attention.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy mother was fascinated by everything in life and she noticed detail,\u201d says her daughter Elle Williams<\/a>, who produced the film. \u201cShe was always paying attention and nothing got past her\u2026 To take a walk with my mom was a very slow process. We were going to stop and smell every flower, not just the roses, but she taught me how to see.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Ginny<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tGinny Williams outside a glass house she designed.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLove Today Productions<\/p>\n

\n\tFynsk got to know Williams in the last years of her life, eventually becoming something of a caretaker and chum. \u201cI got very close to her,\u201d he says. \u201cI was there \u2018til the end. I lived with her and I cooked for her. She was like the mother I never had.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHis film paints a portrait of a singular collector and a singular personality. Ginny Williams did not stand on ceremony.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe would go out for lunch or whatever\u2026 She was so curious about everyone and everything, and when she saw something she liked on someone\u2019s table, she would just literally walk up to the table and pick the food off a complete stranger\u2019s plate and eat it,\u201d Fynsk recalls. \u201cBut she was so disarming that people loved her for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWilliams\u2019 lack of pretense could prove uncomfortable for Elle as a kid.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Producer<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tProducer Elle Williams, daughter of Ginny Williams<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLove Today Productions<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe really was incredibly unfiltered,\u201d the younger Williams remembers. \u201cShe just would say anything to anyone. And if I [told her] what she had said was inappropriate, she really would be baffled. \u2018But why? It\u2019s the truth.\u2019 That wasn\u2019t part of the way she lived. And she was bold and outspoken\u2026 I spent a lot of my childhood just going, \u2018Oh God, mom, please don\u2019t.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWilliams adds, \u201cShe was really a force, but she also exuded love. She loved everyone. She loved people. She loved the world and she truly did find beauty in absolutely everything \u2014 from a crushed can on the side of the road too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe art world, by reputation, abounds in stuffy and self-important characters. But the unpretentious Williams rose to the top of it. She served on the boards of the Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. These were not ornamental positions, but perches from which to exert influence.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe would make sure that they started to acquire work by female artists so it became part of the permanent collections of these museums,\u201d Fynsk comments. \u201cIt was really important. There were so many people there on the board and they were chit-chatting about stuff, and she would just cut right through to it\u2026 She knew she wanted those women to be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'The<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLove Today Productions<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Art Whisperer won the Jury Award for Best Film at the Santa Fe Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Nice International Film Festival in France, and Best Director in a Feature Film at the L\u2019HIFF Barcelona International Film Festival among other prizes. Its emergence as an Oscar contender has come as a pleasant surprise to Fynsk, who did not set out originally to make a documentary focused on his friend (he and Ginny Williams initially had in mind a project about women artists in their 80s).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Director<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDirector Flemming Fynsk<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLove Today Productions<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s unexpected and yeah, it\u2019s amazing,\u201d he says of the Oscar attention. \u201cWhat\u2019s been amazing has been people\u2019s reaction to Ginny and just the people who really like [the film]. They love it, and it\u2019s really touching when people are touched by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter Ginny Williams\u2019 death in 2019 at the age of 92, most of her art collection was sold at auction.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe held onto a lot of the photography collection,\u201d Elle Williams notes. \u201cThat\u2019s where she had started, and every single person in my family is a photographer. We all inherited that passion, but the bulk of it has now spread to the four winds. And I think my mom actually would be really happy about that, knowing that that art is now off on the next stage of its journey, enriching the lives of a whole new set of people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell and more \u2013 some of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[115082,165639,88,165640,165641,206,165642],"class_list":{"0":"post-324573","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-awardsdoc","9":"tag-elle-williams","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-flemming-fynsk","12":"tag-ginny-williams","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-the-art-whisperer"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}