Solo donne

Valeria Napoleone

text: Nicole Ex

Interview

No. 10 • June 2018

In many museums and galleries, you’ll hardly come across work by female artists. In the surprising collection of the renowned Italian collector Valeria Napoleone, they are the only ones who matter.

Fig 1. Valerie Napoleone in her house in Londen

She lives in the heart of London, in the affluent South Kensington, in a house where the walls, floors, and mantelpieces are covered in art. The extravagant Valeria Napoleone collects only works by living female artists—but within that restriction, Napoleone is free to “do whatever I want,” she says with a laugh in a phone interview with See All This. And so she collects paintings and sculptures, film, installations, photography, murals, and drawings.

Her collection now consists of 350 works by around 120 artists from all over the world—including the Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker. As a result, she is a welcome guest at international art fairs, especially at her home base, the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park, where she is invited to exclusive previews a day before the opening: “Collecting art is like a journey,” Napoleone says, “a journey that leads to a new destination with every artist you discover.”

Napoleone was nineteen, a journalism student at New York University, when she bought her first black-and-white photograph by Carol Shadfield in the early 1990s—an abstract work featuring soap bubbles in which, if you look closely, the reflection of a woman’s body appears. The photo mirrored her state of mind at the time: “I felt trapped in a bubble and didn’t know how to reach the outside world.” A descendant of an Italian industrialist family, raised among Renaissance paintings and antiques, Napoleone discovered that it was contemporary art, of all things, that could reach out to her and allow her “to live my own times.” From that very first purchase, she knew exactly what focus she wanted to give her collection. She would “compose a vibrant chorus of female voices,” whose highs, lows, and timbres she could understand—voices that would guide and support her.

She speaks English at the rapid pace of her Italian mother tongue, but she shifts into an even higher gear when she passionately talks about her ultimate mission: “I want to make a difference by putting female artists on the map.” This, despite the resistance she long felt from the art world and the sarcasm she had to endure for excluding all male artists from her collection.

Fig 2. Valeria Napoleone

“I look when no one else is looking, because the invisibility of women is deeply persistent. Especially mid-career female artists are ignored,” she says. It’s called the donut effect: sweet attention at the edges of an artist’s career, with a black hole in the middle. It affects all artists, but for women, it’s far more extreme.

Has she seen any progress in recent years? Napoleone: “To be honest, not much is changing. The market—driven 99.9% by consultants who entirely influence sales—demands increasingly faster production times, and buyers doubt whether women can keep up with that rat race. You often hear collectors say it out loud: ‘I don’t invest in female artists.’”

After studying journalism and earning a master’s degree in Art Gallery Administration, she founded the Valeria Napoleone XX fund in 2012, through which she supports museum and institutional art acquisitions—always in line with her mission—in the UK and the US. She also hosts benefit dinners at her home: evenings where she ties on an apron to serve her guests her classic Italian family recipes, including her legendary and much-talked-about tiramisu. She even published a Catalogue of Exquisite Recipes (2012), illustrated with works by her favorite artists.

Napoleone lives by her own golden rules, the most important of which is that a patron must be completely committed to the wellbeing of their artists and collection. Other golden tips? Take your time with every purchase, do your research, train your eye, meet the artist, and buy with your heart—because while an artist’s career is unpredictable, your love for an artwork will endure.