Gypsy Rose Lee never rushed anything, certainly not a strip tease, and apparently not even her artistic rediscovery. “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly… very slowly,” Lee had once quipped.
The iconic 20th-century burlesque and striptease performer, whose memoir was adapted into the 1959 musical Gypsy, was a woman with a few tricks up her slip. Known as a writer in her later years, she was also an accomplished Surrealist artist, recognized for her collages and paintings. But Lee’s artistic legacy had been all but forgotten—until recently.
“It would be as if Kim Kardashian were a painter, that’s how famous she was,” said Jenna Segal, a Broadway producer, collector, and curator who made it her mission to restore Lee to the artistic canon.
Gypsy Rose Lee, who was born Rose Louise Hovick, fashioned herself an ecdysiast—a more sophisticated term for an exotic dancer. ”Gypsy was an upper-class star. She wasn’t dancing on a pole in a seedy basement in New York City,” said Segal “This was considered an art form. It was respected and she was the best of the best.”
Lee’s works are extremely hard to come by as most, according to her son, were destroyed in a fire. Right now, one of her rare paintings is on view in “31 Women” at MAC/CCB in Lisbon (through June 29, 2025).
The exhibition, which draws from Segal’s personal collection, approximately restages legendary collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim’s pivotal 1943 “Exhibition of 31 Women.” Curated by art historian Patricia Mayayo, “31 Women” debuted at Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, Spain, in 2024 before recently traveling to Lisbon.
The show takes a closer look at Guggenheim’s daring exhibition which centered on the work of women at a time when many were relegated to the roles of wife and muse, and included works by Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, and yes—Gypsy Rose Lee.
The Lisbon exhibition builds on Segal’s own impressive restaging of Guggenheim’s exhibition in 2023 when she presented works by 30 of the 31 artists—all but Lee—at Peggy Guggenheim’s former 57th Street Gallery (the space is now Segal’s office). Segal had put out a call, hoping to track down one of Lee’s works, saying at the time, “It’s shocking that people don’t know her today and that I can’t find a single work by her.”
In the end, the search for Lee’s work was dizzyingly complicated. At one point an art dealer working with Segal located a work in Kent, England. Just before the sale went through the owner of the work passed away unexpectedly and the sale was postponed indefinitely.
Just two weeks before the Madrid opening of “31 Women” however, Segal got word that the late owner’s husband was willing to sell the work. “This process was truly like a strip tease. Gypsy kept dropping these breadcrumbs—dropping a glove, dropping s stocking, a sleeve until finally we’d gotten to the end and the Madrid exhibition was about to open, and that’s when I wound up getting it!” Segal said with a laugh.
In a mad dash, the work shipped from England to New York and back to Spain, because of regulatory laws. Segal was barely able to see the work in between. “It was the usual mad scramble of figuring out how to ship art internationally,” she said “ When the curators opened it in Madrid and they told me it was actually quite an amazing work. And it really is, though also a little gruesome!”
Befitting Gypsy Rose Lee, the painting is provocative, featuring a bowl filled with fruit-like breasts. Segal heard several possible origin stories from Lee’s son, Erik Lee Preminger. The account Segal believes is most likely is that Lee made the painting for her third husband, the Spanish-born artist Julio Diego. “Julio told Gypsy that her breasts were like ripe peaches so she painted him a bowl of her breasts,” she explained.
Segal, who set out to collect a work by each woman in Guggenheim’s 1943 exhibition, feels she can enjoy the moment a bit more now that Gypsy Rose Lee’s work has been found. “The obsession has abated a bit,” said Segal.
Right now, she’s enjoying these women artists’ stories take on new dimensions. “There were over 1,000 people at the exhibition opening in Lisbon,” said Segal. “[People] were really engaging with the work and most had never heard of most of these artists before. It was just so fabulous, watching everybody take that in and appreciate it.”
These overlooked women’s stories offer, in Segal’s opinion, a much-needed place for beauty and hope today. “Hearing these women’s stories and how Peggy Guggenheim discovered their work in another pivotal moment in time, allows us to rediscover history in a beautiful way rather than a tragic way,” she said. “It just feels like a force for good.”
