Boss Women of the Art World: Edith Halpert

This series is meant as praise to some of the women who laid the foundations for or who currently shaking things up in the art world.

© Veda Lane

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately and serendipitously found a figure I never knew existed and now realise what a tragedy that is. I’m talking about New York’s first female art dealer and American Modern Art dealer Edith Halpert.

Edith Gregoryevna Fivoosiovitch’s family emigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1905 when Edith was six. Due to bad investing and bad luck, Edith began working. Edith began at a candy store and ascended from there. At twenty five, she was on the board of directors at an investment bank earning approximately $230,000 per year. This success, one which was extremely rare for a woman, encouraged her to invest in art, take art classes, explore the gallery scene, and led her to marry painter Sam Halpert.

Edith’s relationship with Halpert was strained and she sent him to an analyst who recommended that she give up her job and that she was emasculating him. The couple should travel, spend all of her hard-earned money, and when they returned to the States her husband would support Edith. How Sam would support Edith was not thought through.

Unacceptable for Edith. If your significant other claims you intimidate them because you’re good at what you do, you’re successful, and they want you to spend it all so that they can support you? Run. Run and start a landmark Modernist gallery. In 1925, with her savings from the investment firm, she opened a gallery in Greenwich Village, the Downtown Gallery, that would influence the art scene whether the art scene wanted it or not. On top of that, Edith was only twenty six when she opened the location.

By settling in Greenwich Village Edith created a space closer to where artists lived which made her more accessible to them. This also attracted younger collectors that couldn’t afford to get into art. Halpert became agent for and promoted American Artists at a time before American Art was taken as a serious contender to its counterparts in London and Paris. About the Downtown Gallery, Edith wrote: “ [it] emphasises the belief.. in the democracy of art, and in the fact that it is possible to buy small works, at prices within reach of the most modest income.”

Even as Edith championed the small artist and likewise the small collector, she still had the clout to get stuff done in the realm of America’s gilded collectors. Edith had a hand encouraging the founding of the Museum of Modern Art and five hundred of her artist’s works can be found at MoMA through the Rockefeller bequest. Halpert’s influence can also be seen at the Museum of Modern Art through Jacob Lawrence’s migration series. Halpert also represented other major artists. Georgia O’Keeffe, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley are a few of the many artists adorning the walls of her gallery, her home, and today museums.

Edith had an eye for the wild. According to the Financial Times, “America’s strength,” Edith believed, “lay in its diversity, its individualism, its unwillingness to conform even to a revolutionary set of prescriptions.” Her gallery was a mixed bag filled with diverse expressions of American Art and life. Curators still pull from her exhibition style, where she would place self-taught 19th century artists next to everyday items and a proliferation of modern artists with drastically different styles.

An archived radio emission aired 1950 from WNYC, published by the New York Public Radio Archive Collections, focuses on Edith’s gallery and its cultural contribution to the city on its 25th anniversary. Asked a question about “formidably priced” galleries, she lavished in answering:

“We’ve never had anything at $50,000. I hope by my 50th anniversary I might be able to sell one object, that American art might reach that stage.”

It certainly has. I think she knew it would, too. Her ingenuity was inexhaustible. My favourite thing she said during the interview?

“We feel we are just as necessary as a deep freezer, although I feel we give warmth.”

She had aspirations for American art. The Jewish Museum in New York City was the first to canvas her career through the exhibition “Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art.”

About Edith Halpert’s indelible impression on American Art, the Jewish Museum states:

“Halpert’s socially progressive values were on full display at her gallery, In addition to regularly presenting work by women, immigrants, and Jewish artists, the Downtown Gallery was the first major mainstream art space in New York City to promote the work of African American artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin. When the Japanese American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi was classified as an enemy alien during World War II, she mounted a defiant exhibition of his paintings in 1942. From Georgia O’Keeffe to Ben Shahn, the artists she supported became icons of American Modernism. With her revolutionary program at the Downtown Gallery, Halpert inspired generations of Americans to value the art of their own country, in their own time. Halpert’s insistence to support free expression and diverse perspectives as defining features of American art and culture has never been more timely or relevant.”

Edith Halpert was Jewish. She was a woman. She was an immigrant to the United States. And she made something that brought together the quintessential manifold narratives of America and established a fresh perspective towards American art and artists. Many landmark artists were cultivated and supported through her work and Edith’s vision of an accessible gallery defined an equitable approach permanently shifting the status and interpretation of American Modern art. This quote comes from Sotheby’s Auction House, in which Lithuanian-born American artist William Zorach, describes Halpert:

“Edith Halpert was always full of ideas and projects. She didn’t have to depend on anyone. She did not follow in the footsteps of others; she did not take the easy way of promoting and selling European art where the path was clear and well-trodden. She set out to promote American art because she believed in it and realised that if this country was ever to have an American art it had to come from American artists.. This she made her goal and she has stuck to it with a single-minded devotion. American art owes her a great debt.”

Local cultural economies. Support for emerging artists. Support for those who love art. Art is necessary like a deep freezer. We should definitely be talking about her more often.

Veda Lane,

Head of Features, MADE IN BED