Now You See Her. Loren MacIver

Quick!  A question.  Who was the first female artist to have her work hung on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art?   Does the name of Loren MacIver come to mind?  I thought not.  The diffident MacIver (1909-1998) only made it into the collection because of the intervention of her husband, poet Lloyd Frankenberg, who brought her work to the attention of Alfred H. Barr in 1935.   Barr was so impressed that he not only bought  MacIver's painting Shack for the museum but also one for himself.  (It was none other than the fem-a-phobic MoMA that inspired the first protest by the Guerilla Girls,  women artists who staged an informational picket in front of the museum on June 14, 1984.)   No less an art dealer than Pierre Matisse (yes, son of Henri) began to exhibit her work when MacIver was just thirty years old.  Her paintings were included in MoMA's landmark exhibition  Fantastic Art - Dada - Surrealism (1937)and  MacIver represented the United States at the 1962 Venice Biennale.

MacIver's work is at its most convincing when she brings her particular angle of vision to bear, especially on urban life.    It underlines the obvious to point out that whether her subject is votive, candles, subway lights, or a cracked window shade, items that we might see on any day, become objects to marvel at.
Her 'why' is unknowable but her 'how' is not difficult to understand, an unusual balancing of opposites.  MacIver experimented with enmeshing vivid colors in the blurry grayness of the city, so that when we discern the flicker of a candle, or the glitter of a metal reflector or even just those tiny pin holes in a cloth shade, we are entranced by small instances of light  

And yet today  MacIver  shares the fate of so many female artists whose accomplishments and even their very existence have to be insisted on again and again.   Wikipedia, for instance, has no page devoted to Loren MacIver.