The Girl with the Gallery - Softcover

Pollock, Lindsay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586485121 ISBN 13: 9781586485122

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2007

Synopsis

In an era when American artists didn't count and women were expected to stay home, Edith Gregor Halpert burst onto the fledgling New York gallery scene, defying all cultural and societal rules. In 1926, Halpert, just twenty-six years old, opened one of the first art galleries in Greenwich Village and set about turning the art world upside down. Her Downtown Gallery, which she ran for forty-four years, laid the groundwork for the art market's modern era, and its aggressive promotion and sales tactics. Halpert cultivated the most illustrious art collectors of the day, invented the market for folk art, and pushed the first group of American artists working in a modern vernacular into the history books, including Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Dove. Despite all this, Edith Halpert herself has been lost to history. Until now.

In The Girl with the Gallery, journalist Lindsay Pollock brings Halpert and her era vividly back to life, tracing the story of how this remarkable woman, who started out a penniless Jewish immigrant, made it her mission to fight for American art and artists. Illlustrated with eight pages of full color photographs, this is biography at its finest, an unforgettable story of class, money, vanity, jealousy, and tragic loss.

About this title

About the Author:

Lindsay Pollock is a journalist specializing in the art market. She currently works for Bloomberg News, where she writes a weekly column and reports frequently for TV and radio. A former columnist for the New York Sun, she also writes regularly for Art & Auction, Art News, Art Review, and The Art Newspaper. This is her first book. Lindsay lives in New York City.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Without visionary art dealers, radical artists would remain starving artists. Edith Gregor Halpert was one such champion. In her resounding first book, art journalist Pollock tells for the first time the story of Halpert's life, a tale of conviction and chutzpah that is by turns charming, historically significant, and sad. Born in Odessa in 1900, Edith grew up in New York mad about art and utterly disinterested in convention. Determined to help struggling artists, this trailblazer traded on her beauty, moxie, keen eye, and entrepreneurial genius to open the first modern and politically charged art gallery in Greenwich Village in 1926. Advocating for the likes of Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, and Jacob Lawrence, Edith formed an unlikely but fruitful alliance with art lover Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Instrumental in fostering serious appreciation for American folk art, Edith discovered many overlooked masterpieces, including the paintings of Edward Hicks. She also worked herself into exhaustion, especially during the Depression years, never found love, and infuriated many. Framed by a fresh and lively chronicle of the coalescence of New York's art world, Pollock's riveting portrait celebrates an inspired defender of artistic freedom. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1586485121
• ISBN 13: 9781586485122
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 504