Edith Gregor Halpert, born Edith Gregoryevna Fivoosiovitch, was a pioneering New York City dealer of American modern art and American folk art. In addition, Edith Halpert brought recognition and market success to many avant-garde American artists.
Background
Edith G. Halpert was born on April 25, 1900, in Odessa, then Russia (now Ukraine), the daughter of Gregor Fivoosiovitch, a tailor, and Francis Lucom. In 1906 the family immigrated to New York City, but Halpert did not become a naturalized citizen until 1921.
Education
While attending Wadleigh High School, Halpert also studied at the National Academy of Design, taking classes in 1914 - 1915 with Leon Kroll, Ivan Olinsky, and Frederic A. Bridgman.
In 1917 Halpert began writing copy and doing sketches in the advertising department of the Stern Brothers department store. During these years Halpert found a mentor in Doctor John Weichsel, who founded the People's Art Guild in 1915. Devoted to expanding and improving the knowledge of art, the guild was an artists' cooperative that organized exhibitions in churches, meeting halls, and settlement houses.
Career
Halpert worked as personnel manager and head of the correspondence department for the investment bankers S. W. Straus and Company from 1920 to 1925. In 1925 Galerie Lilloises asked her to reorganize its department store in Lille, France.
After a year in Europe Halpert and her husband returned to New York resolved to open a gallery for contemporary American artists. In 1926 the Halperts launched the Downtown Gallery, the first gallery devoted to modern art in New York City's Greenwich Village. It was one of only seven in the city that exhibited modern American art and, along with Alfred Stieglitz' Intimate Gallery and the Charles Daniel Gallery, was one of only three that dealt exclusively in American art. A statement issued at the opening declared, "The Downtown Gallery rises as a new need in the art life of New York. It will present exhibitions from the work of the best artists representing the various tendencies in American art. The Gallery has no special prejudice for any school. Its selection is directed by what is enduring, not what is in vogue. "Artists represented in the gallery's inaugural exhibition, now regarded as leading figures of their time, included Mary and William Zorach, Walt Kuhn, John Marin, Niles Spencer, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Elie Nadelman, Abraham Walkowitz, John Sloan, and Max Weber.
Halpert also began to collect American folk art in 1926, and in 1929, in an upstairs room at the Downtown Gallery, she opened the first gallery devoted to American folk art. Beginning in 1929 she made numerous trips to New England, Pennsylvania, and upper New York State in her black Hupmobile, looking for old portraits, still lifes on velvet, birth certificates with watercolor designs, figureheads, and weather vanes.
Always paying cash and never leaving a forwarding address, Halpert amassed in three years a collection of over 1, 000 works, many of them masterpieces of pre-twentieth-century American folk art. Halpert could justify the inclusion of a wide range of artists in her collection because she defined "folk art" broadly. She wrote in 1950, "'Folk' in this country does not denote "peasant. " Basically, American folk art was the art of middle-class kindred folk with a kindred philosophy. Folk art includes the work of professionals as well as amateurs, of adults and minors, of the taught and untaught, produced commercially or as an avocation, in both rural and urban communities. "
Buyers were infrequent for Halpert's collection of American folk art until Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , began making regular purchases. These came to form the bulk of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller collection of American folk art at the Ludwell-Paradise House in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Halpert wrote the first catalog for the collection in 1939. She became well known for her expertise in the field in the 1940's, lecturing frequently and writing articles for popular magazines. Although Halpert was widowed suddenly in 1930, her success as a folk-art dealer enabled her to continue supporting contemporary American artists. The painters Jack Levine, Ben Shahn, Louis Guglielmi, George L. K. Morris, and Jacob Lawrence were given their first one-person shows at the Downtown Gallery. Stuart Davis, Bernard Karfiol, and Charles Sheeler were shown frequently. In the late 1930's and early 1940's the gallery held several exhibitions of American social-realist painting and gained a reputation for backing socially and artistically progressive work.
The paintings of virtually all the twentieth-century pioneers of modern art in America appeared at the Downtown Gallery. Halpert organized New York City's first municipal art exhibition, held at Radio City Music Hall in 1934. Later in the 1930's she organized allocation and exhibition programs for the Federal Art Project. In 1941, with the assistance of Alain Locke of Howard University, Halpert mounted one of the first major survey exhibitions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black American artists, featuring work by Henry O. Tanner, Horace Pippin, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence.
In the 1940's Halpert moved the Downtown Gallery uptown to East 56th Street and then to East 57th Street, where it continued to operate under the same name. In 1951 she sectioned off a portion of the premises to form the Ground Floor Gallery, where she exhibited young, unknown artists. Throughout the 1950's she continued to show unknown (primarily abstract) artists along with well-established members of the gallery.
Although devoted to the artists she represented, Halpert was also concerned with the social and economic rights of visual artists in general. In the 1950's she established a small but active private foundation that published guidelines concerning the relationship between museums and living artists. A woman who felt a moral obligation to support American art and living American artists, Halpert enjoyed one of the longest and most distinguished careers of any art dealer in New York City. Edith Halpert died on October 6, 1970, in New York City, after a long illness.
Among the artists she favored were Edward Hicks and William Michael Harnett, whose once-popular Victorian still-life paintings Edith Halpert rediscovered in the 1930's.
Connections
At a weekly Weichsel soiree Edith G. Fivoosiovitch met the painter Samuel Halpert, whom she married in 1918; they had no children.