Lucie Cousturier. Woman Reading. 1907. Oil on canvas. 33 1/2 × 44" (85.1 × 111.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the E. & A. Silberman Galleries

For over half a century, Lucie Cousturier’s sparkling, jewel-toned Woman Reading (1907)—with its subject depicted head propped on hand, immersed in a book—remained hidden away, hanging on a screen in MoMA’s storage facility, waiting patiently to be pulled out and viewed. That moment finally came in October 2023, prompted by the Department of Painting and Sculpture’s ongoing collection review. Julie Reiter Greene, a collection specialist, had generated a list of works that had not been exhibited at the Museum since their arrival. This was the case with Cousturier’s painting, which was gifted to MoMA in 1960 by the E. & A. Silberman Galleries, but which had never been displayed on the Museum’s walls, and which none of the current generation of Painting and Sculpture curators had seen. Its relative invisibility was in keeping with the all-too-frequent erasure of women’s contributions to modern art’s history during the latter half of the last century. Here at MoMA, as elsewhere, women as art makers were rarely the focus of interest.

Lucie Cousturier. Woman Reading. 1907

Lucie Cousturier. Woman Reading. 1907

Maximilien Luce. Lucie Cousturier. 1903

Maximilien Luce. Lucie Cousturier. 1903

Fast-forwarding to the present moment—one in which curators, critics, and art historians are all-too-keenly aware of the inadequacies of a history of modern art structured around a few mythic (male) figures—it is possible to recognize anew what a remarkable individual Cousturier was. Far from being a marginalized or obscure figure, she was at the center of Parisian Neo-Impressionist circles of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. She was an accomplished artist in her own right, with a distinguished exhibition record, and a writer who published early and definitive articles and books on important artists within the Neo-Impressionist movement, including Georges-Pierre Seurat and Paul Signac. Fellow Neo-Impressionist artists Maximilien Luce and Théo van Rysselberghe painted her portrait. She was also a patron; she and her husband, Edmond Cousturier, owned a major collection of Neo-Impressionist paintings, including Seurat’s magnum opus, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884/86), which Cousturier’s father, Léon Casimir Brû, gave to her as a wedding present in 1900. Later in life, she traveled widely in Western Africa and, unusual for a French woman of her era, became recognized for her criticism of French colonialism: her 1920 book Des Inconnus chez moi (Unknown Persons at Home) addressed the problem of colonial prejudices and stereotypes, and the French government’s mistreatment of Africans.

Georges-Pierre Seurat. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. 1884/86

Georges-Pierre Seurat. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. 1884/86

In March 2024, six months after Painting and Sculpture curators and collection specialists first looked at Cousturier’s painting in storage, and 64 years (!) after it first arrived at the Museum, Woman Reading was finally placed on public view. No longer hidden in plain sight, it hangs next to her friend and colleague Signac’s Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890 (1890) and Seurat’s The Channel at Gravelines, Evening (1890). Created in 1907, the same year as Cousturier’s first solo exhibition in Paris at the Eugène Druet Gallery, Woman Reading’s ambitious composition and tessellated strokes of bright pinks, greens, yellows, and blues confirm Signac’s assessment of her “exquisite and natural taste for shapes” and her “most dazzling colors.” Its subject, a woman alone and reading, was depicted by other artists of the period, including Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot; it embodies intellectual pursuit and individualism within a bourgeois interior as its own radical gesture. The shimmering surround conjures a realm of reverie and imagination, where firmer details, rendered in an atomized, divisionist style, appear in a state of perpetual dissolve.

To install Cousturier’s painting on the Museum’s walls is to acknowledge, celebrate, and highlight her many accomplishments—as an artist engaged with some of the newest techniques in rendering color and form; as a key chronicler of the movement in which she worked, Neo-Impressionism; and as a generous patron. It is also to deepen our knowledge of modern art’s history, and of women artists’ achievements in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, while offering a vivid reminder of the many different ideas and histories that can be explored through the Museum’s dynamic program of frequently changing collection displays.

Installation view of Gallery 501: French Landscapes and Interiors at MoMA

Installation view of Gallery 501: French Landscapes and Interiors at MoMA

Lucie Cousturier’s Woman Reading is currently on view in Gallery 501: French Landscapes and Interiors.