The Society for the History of Collecting is delighted to invite you to its forthcoming Online Lecture Helena Cuss, ‘So that art shall not perish from democracies at war’: transnational art dealer Ala Story and the American British Center in New York, c. 1940-1945 on Thursday 19 March 2026, 6-7pm (BST); 7-8pm (CET); 1-2pm (EST); 11-12am (PDT)
Ala Story came to London from Vienna in 1928 as a young woman to make her way in the contemporary art market. She integrated into modernist gallery networks rapidly, learning her trade at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Redfern Gallery and Lucy Wertheim Gallery before opening her own business, the Storran Gallery, in a basement near Harrods in 1932, where she showed well-known British modernists, graduates of the Slade, and newly-arrived refugees from Germany and Austria.
With the outbreak of the Blitz in 1949 Story emigrated to New York in 1940, where she opened the American British Art Center, a pioneering gallery-cum-members club hybrid in which she redefined support models for living art and blurred the boundaries between commercial and non-profit business models. With characteristic determination, boldness and a magnetic personality, she enlisted the luminaries of the British and American art establishments and New York high society – including Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Sir Kenneth Clark and Charlie Chaplain – to (in the motto of the ABAC), ‘Help to Keep Alive British Contemporary Art’.
This talk outlines her journey from Vienna to New York via London and her tireless campaign to raise the profile of British art in the USA during the Second World War, and considers how far Story represents both the imperative for early women art dealers to efface their considerable commercial acumen into the role of ‘art organisers’ or artists’ ‘helpers’, and the advantages of the émigré’s ‘insider-outsider’ status in the rapidly internationalising 20th-century art market.
SPEAKER BIO: Helena Cuss is an independent art historian and research consultant with a special interest in the intersection of British art and migration. Last year she completed a Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD with Kingston on the role of refugee art dealers in the internationalisation of the twentieth-century London art market, and in summer 2024 curated the exhibition Cosmopolis: The Impact of Refugee Art Dealers in London at Ben Uri Gallery. Prior to this, she was Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, where she contributed to exhibitions including David Hockney: Drawing from Life, Love Stories: Art, Passion & Tragedyand Tudors to Windors: British Royal Portraits.
Registration for the lecture will close on 17 March 2026. All those registered will receive a link via email to register for the Zoom link on 18 March 2026 –https://thesocietyforthehistoryofcollecting.wildapricot.org/event-6571038/RegistrationSource: https://thesocietyforthehistoryofcollecting.wildapricot.org/event-6571038
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