Called 31:Women, the exhibition focuses on leading female artists of the 20^th and 21^st century and also sheds light on the research and projects conducted by its staff in the last five years on Duchamp and his curatorial practices.

The art collector Peggy Guggenheim had just opened her gallery on West 57 Street in the fall of 1942 when a  friend Marcel Duchamp suggested that she organizes an all-woman exhibition. Guggenheim loved the idea: the show, featuring 31 women, would be radical not only because of its gender composition but also because of its modernist selection, with most of the paintings, drawings, and sculptures on view being either abstract or Surrealist.

Even though Georgia O'Keeffe declined an invitation to be in the show, saying that she refuses to be categorized as a "woman painter," many others, working in the shadows of male artists or facing gender discrimination, have joined. Among them were sculptor Xenia Cage, whose husband took all the fame (the composer John Cage) and painter Buffie Johnson, who had been bluntly refused by critics to review her shows, noting that women should stick to having babies. 

Then there was Gypsy Rose Lee, a popular vaudeville stripper (who was also a writer and a regular in the bohemian cultural circles) and the more traditional, full-time artists, like the abstract sculptor Louise Nevelson and the Surrealists Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, and Meret Oppenheim, whose work, a teacup and spoon covered in fur, had shocked the visitors at the MoMA’s "Fantastic Art" exhibition several years prior.

The second exhibition, "The Women", was on view in the summer of 1945, featuring 33 women artists, some of whom had also taken part in the previous show, but also new ones, like Nell Blaine, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Charmion von Wiegand, and Catherine Yarrow.

Daimler’s version of “31 Women” is organized in historical terms, starting with the works from the Bauhaus and concrete art traditions, moving on to European and American movements, such as Group Zero and Minimalism, and then expanding to younger artists from India, South Africa, Nigeria, Chile, Israel, the United States, and other countries.

Spanning from works of Anni Albers (1899-1994) to Andrea Zittel (b. 1965), its content reflects a wide range of early feminist trends, as well as contemporary perspectives. The latter include videos by Andrea Fraser, photos by Zanele Muholi and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, silk screen prints by Anni Albers and sculpture by Madeleine Boschan. There’s something from almost every media, artistic movement and corner of the world on display here, truly a magic collection of female art.