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Edith Gregor Halpert--dealer extraordinaire.(The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market )(Book review)
If Edith Gregor Halpert's Downtown Gallery, which occupied four separate locations in New York City between 1926 and 1970, could be likened to anything, it would be to that teetering and tottering apparatus known as the seesaw. On one side sat cutting-edge and therefore underappreciated contemporary artists such as Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Ben Shahn, Jacob Lawrence, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, along with dozens of anonymous eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American folk painters and artisans. On the other side sat finicky but prescient clients, among them Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Duncan Phillips, Wright Ludington, Frank Crowninshield, Roy Neuberger, and an astonishing number of museums located from New York City to Los Angeles and everywhere in between. Sitting squarely in the middle and always trying to tinker with the balance of things was the enigmatic, beautiful, feisty, often brilliant, but always larger-than-life Halpert. How she accomplished all she did with the many players who floated in and out of her gallery, became her friends, lovers, and enemies but never her confidantes, is the subject of an engaging new biography with the unfortunate title The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market, written by Lindsay Pollock.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Halpert was a controlling woman with an insatiable ego, so it is no surprise that she was mindful about keeping a paper trail that chronicled the heady days when New York City emerged as the center of the art world. In so doing, she squirreled away and later deposited at the Archives of American Art (part of the Smithsonian Institution) what Pollock describes as "hundreds of thousands of letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, sales slips, press releases, and other materials" that record the history of the Downtown Gallery.
Born Ginda Fivoosiovitch in Odessa, Russia, in 1899 or 1900, Halpert immigrated to the United States in 1906 with her widowed mother and sister. She was in her own words, "a nasty little kid." They settled in Harlem, which, by happenstance, was not far from the National Academy of Design. Lying about her age Halpert, who was only about fourteen at the time, enrolled in the academy as Edith Georgiana Fein. A year or so later she found work (this time lying about her age and her experience) in retailing, working first at Bloomingdale's and then at Macy's and Stern Brothers. These positions taught her much about marketing and sales.
She learned about art by frequenting Alfred Stieglitz's gallery (known as 291), the Montross Gallery, and the Whitney Studio Club founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Here she met many established and emerging artists, among them Sam Halpert, whom she quickly married. Interludes in Europe and Ogunquit, Maine, with her husband rapidly persuaded Halpert to extricate herself from the marriage. She returned to the city and decided to open a gallery featuring the ...
- Electra Havemeyer Webb and Edith Gregor Halpert: a collaboration in folk art...
- Magazine article from: The Magazine Antiques Joyce, Henry January 1, 2003 700+ words
...between Electra Havemeyer Webb, the collector and founder of the museum, and the folk and contemporary art dealer Edith Gregor Halpert (Fig. 2). (1) Between 1950 and 1960, these two unusual, creative, and energetic women worked together...
- Elie and Viola Nadelman's unprecedented museum of folk arts.
- Magazine article from: The Magazine Antiques Stillenger, Elizabeth October 1, 1994 700+ words
Four years before the first American folk art exhibition and six years before Edith Gregor Halpert and Holger Cahill's eye-opening visit to the folk-art-filled studios of the Ogunquit artists of Maine, Viola and Elie...
- Chalkware.
- Magazine article from: The Magazine Antiques Lange, Amanda E. Reilly, Julie A. October 1, 1994 700+ words
...unshackled by aesthetic theories, had achieved.(1) These artists and their friends, including the art dealers Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970) and Holger Cahill (1887-1960), were the catalysts who propelled American folk sculpture into...
- The Archives of American Art at 50.
- Magazine article from: The Magazine Antiques Kirwin, Liza November 1, 2005 700+ words
...OMITTED] In the depths of the Great Depression the painter Stuart Davis (1892-1964) appealed to his dealer Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970): I have every respect for the fact that your gallery is doing very little business and that it...
- Holger Cahill and American folk art.
- Magazine article from: The Magazine Antiques Jeffers, Wendy September 1, 1995 700+ words
...England coast, through eastern Pennsylvania, and as far south as Baltimore. Participants in later trips included Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970), the owner of the Downtown Gallery in New York City; several artists; and Dorothy C. Miller...
- Book bits; Carl Hiassen on his latest novel, three books about art, and...
- Newspaper article from: The Christian Science Monitor January 2, 2007 700+ words
...more versed in art history. She was only 26 years old, an immigrant, and a woman. But none of this stopped Edith Gregor Halpert from founding the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village in 1926 and becoming a visionary champion of the American...
