Starting With Zero Money, She Amassed One Of World’s Greatest Art Collections. Oscar Contender ‘The Art Whisperer’ Explores Remarkable Ginny Williams

Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell and more – some of the greatest artists of recent times owe something to one person, art collector Ginny Williams.

Before 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.

“She collected these women when no one took notice,” says Flemming Fynsk, director of The Art Whisperer, the Oscar-contending documentary about Williams. “Roni Horn, for instance, she was instrumental really for her; Ann Hamilton, she’s a major artist now. But also Joan Mitchell for instance, and she sought these people out. She would befriend them.”

Remarkably, as the film explores, Williams didn’t begin collecting until she turned 60, after a divorce that left her without any financial resources.

“She 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,” Fynsk says, noting Williams eventually amassed a collection of 450 pieces that included work by Georgia O’Keeffe, the largest collection of Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures in private hands and photography by Robert Mapplethorpe, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Ruth Bernhard and others. The value? Inestimable.

“She 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,” Fynsk observes. “She 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.”

The Ginny Williams eye. Nothing seemed to escape her attention.

“My mother was fascinated by everything in life and she noticed detail,” says her daughter Elle Williams, who produced the film. “She was always paying attention and nothing got past her… 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.”

Fynsk got to know Williams in the last years of her life, eventually becoming something of a caretaker and chum. “I got very close to her,” he says. “I was there ‘til the end. I lived with her and I cooked for her. She was like the mother I never had.”

His film paints a portrait of a singular collector and a singular personality. Ginny Williams did not stand on ceremony.

“We would go out for lunch or whatever… She was so curious about everyone and everything, and when she saw something she liked on someone’s table, she would just literally walk up to the table and pick the food off a complete stranger’s plate and eat it,” Fynsk recalls. “But she was so disarming that people loved her for it.”

Williams’ lack of pretense could prove uncomfortable for Elle as a kid.

“She really was incredibly unfiltered,” the younger Williams remembers. “She just would say anything to anyone. And if I [told her] what she had said was inappropriate, she really would be baffled. ‘But why? It’s the truth.’ That wasn’t part of the way she lived. And she was bold and outspoken… I spent a lot of my childhood just going, ‘Oh God, mom, please don’t.’”

Williams adds, “She 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 — from a crushed can on the side of the road too.”

The 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’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. These were not ornamental positions, but perches from which to exert influence.

“She would make sure that they started to acquire work by female artists so it became part of the permanent collections of these museums,” Fynsk comments. “It 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… She knew she wanted those women to be seen.”

The 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’HIFF 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).

“It’s unexpected and yeah, it’s amazing,” he says of the Oscar attention. “What’s been amazing has been people’s reaction to Ginny and just the people who really like [the film]. They love it, and it’s really touching when people are touched by it.”

After Ginny Williams’ death in 2019 at the age of 92, most of her art collection was sold at auction.

“We held onto a lot of the photography collection,” Elle Williams notes. “That’s 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.”