Celebration
For Ursula
A card from Mary Heilmann
Mary Heilmann, The Green Room, Hawaiian Wave for Ursula, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 9 x 12 in.
Ursula Hauser, one of the most dedicated and pioneering art collectors of her generation, celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday this summer. The matriarch and a co-founder of the gallery Hauser & Wirth, as well as the namesake of this magazine, Ursula has long centered her collection around the work of groundbreaking female artists, including Meret Oppenheim, Louise Bourgeois and Maria Lassnig.
In 1994, two years after the founding of the gallery, Ursula met one of the first artists with whom she would form a lifelong bond, Mary Heilmann. Mary's journal entry from Sunday, May 8, 1994, a remarkable snapshot of the period, describes their first meeting, the previous day in her TriBeCa studio, which Ursula visited with her future son-in-law and partner in the gallery's founding, Iwan Wirth:
Worked on ceramic studio/Went to Canal St for paint/To the gallery for slides/I [Irving] Blum came in/To Mitchell Algus's/Then home/Then mtng/Then Indochine/The(n) here with Ivan [sic], Ursula, Patty [Martori], Pat [Hearn].
On the occasion of the milestone birthday, Mary recently made a new painting for Ursula, a lush, almost baroquee vocation of ocean waves and nature's grandeur. The painting is presented here in the spirit of a public birthday card, paired with a fitting passage from the great Swiss novelist and short-story writer Robert Walser, whose feeling for the art of his time was as finely tuned as that of Ursula Hauser.
Cover of Robert Walser, Prosastucke, 1st ed. (Zurich: Rascher u Cie, 1917)
“The Countess is gazing at my collection of paintings. She does this almost every day after lunch. She loves to sit motionless for hours, looking at pictures. It’s as if she had a special bond with them, had something to say to them with multiple digressions, felt they had something of considerable length to tell her. She finds looking at an important picture more entertaining than reading a book, however important. What is contained in long, thick books, she says quite openly, is rarely more than a repetition of what we tell ourselves day after day, hour after hour. Pictures, on the other hand, are surprises worthy of being pondered and feasted on. When it comes to books, she loves poetry above all, because lines of verse contain the most art. To her, what is important and delightful about works of art is the art in them, not all the accompaniments—the storytelling, stage-setting, the wise and prudent parts. Since she herself is wise and knowledgeable about most things of this earth, she can no doubt afford to disdain having these things repeated to her again and again by writers. To her, pictures are miracles, fairytales and even stories, although it isn’t stories they tell. They speak to her of Nature, eternally riveting, incomprehensible Nature! She has no desire to have others relate to her what she already knows. Colors and lines have a sweeter way of telling their stories. No words ring out in them, just scents and sounds.”
—from “A Painter,” by Robert Walser (1904)
Ursula Hauser in Los Angeles, 1992 © Archive Ursula Hauser
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Mary Heilmann is one of the preeminent abstract painters of her generation. Heilmann’s work overlays the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the spontaneous ethos of the Beat generation. It is distinguishable by its often unorthodox, yet always joyful, approach to color and form. Heilmann has spent her life living near the ocean, first in California, where she was raised, and then, since the late 1960s, in New York, both in Manhattan and Bridgehampton.
For Mother Weaver, a new film commissioned by The Forgotten Her Story and directed by Lily Cole, Ursula Hauser meets with her daughter Manuela and Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist to reflect on the artists and ideas that are central to her collection. The film was produced on the occasion of the exhibition "The Mother & The Weaver" at London’s Foundling Museum, which explores the complex role of the mother in art from the Ursula Hauser Collection. The film will premiere to the general public at Hauser & Wirth New York's 18th Street location on Friday, November 1 from 7-9 pm.