T he Collection of Sybil Shainwald reflects her deep love of art, savvy acquisitions of under-represented women artists and appreciation of feminine themes. It encompasses a wide-ranging group of works spanning European and American modernism as well as postwar abstraction. The psychologically-charged imagery of Dorothea Tanning and the surreal painted Femme-bouteille by René Magritte sit alongside compositions by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Lee Bontecou. Drawings by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso further extend the dialogue and expand the vision of the Collection. Though varied in media and approach, the Collection is unified by an engagement with the female figure, explored across generations and artistic languages.

She began acquiring works while living in New York with her husband, Sidney Shainwald, a certified public accountant and consumer advocate, whose clients included artists Marc Chagall, George Grosz and Jacques Lipchitz. The couple regularly visited their studios.

A pioneering lawyer and devoted champion for women, Sybil Shainwald was also responsible for mass worldwide legislation suing companies that produced medical devices and drugs harmful to women. She established new standards of accountability within the pharmaceutical industry. Instrumental in changing the law to expand the statute of limitations for latent injuries in New York, she filed the first case under the Revival and Discovery Statute, thus making compensation possible for thousands of women and their children, whose injuries had been ignored, marginalized or dismissed.

Her career, spanning almost five decades, included teaching, lecturing and publishing on the inequities of women’s health and rights. In 2004, she established the Sidney Shainwald Public Interest Lecture series in honor of her late husband featuring speakers including Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Senator Edward Kennedy and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

To quote Sybil Shainwald, “I never thought of my art as an investment. I bought what I liked."