HAZEL GUGGENHEIM MCKINLEY

New York, 1903 — New Orleans, 1995

Born Barbara Hazel Guggenheim in New York City, Hazel G. McKinley was the only artist among the three Guggenheim sisters and a painter of genuine seriousness — prolific, formally trained, and active across seven decades. Her life was marked by personal catastrophe: her father Benjamin perished on the Titanic in 1912; two infant sons died in a fall from a New York rooftop in 1928; and her fourth husband, painter and USAAF pilot Charles "Chick" McKinley — whose name she kept for the rest of her life — was killed in a plane crash in November 1942. She was, nevertheless, relentlessly creative.

Having begun painting in her teens, McKinley moved to Paris in 1922 and later settled in Sussex, England, where she received formal instruction from Rowland Suddaby, Raymond Coxon, and Edna Ginesi, becoming associated with the London Group and the Euston Road School. Her early palette was restrained, brightening through the 1930s into a range that at times approached Fauvism; under the influence of the Surrealists her work grew freer and more whimsical. She had her first solo exhibition at the Coolings Gallery in London in April 1937. Returning to the United States at the outbreak of war, she settled briefly in California before relocating permanently to New Orleans.

McKinley was also a significant collector and philanthropist. Her most notable gift was Kandinsky's Cossacks (1910–11), donated to the Tate Gallery in London in 1938 following its exhibition at her sister's Guggenheim Jeune gallery — a work now among the Tate's most prized holdings. She also donated more than twenty-five works to Wakefield Art Gallery (now The Hepworth Wakefield) and contributed to collections in Hull, Manchester, and Leeds.

Her inclusion in Peggy's Exhibition by 31 Women (1943) — where she showed Happy Land (1942), a work whose location remains unknown — was the only occasion Peggy exhibited her sister's work, a fact that reflects their famously complicated dynamic. In her later years, McKinley ran a small gallery in West Cornwall, Connecticut, taught at Xavier Gonzalez's summer schools, and continued studying and exhibiting at Newcomb College in New Orleans into her eighties. Her watercolor, Nylons (n.d.), was included in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25) and 31 Mulheres at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025), bringing her long-underrecognized practice into renewed international focus.

Work by Hazel Guggenheim McKinley is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain McKinley's contributions in the record of art history.