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.
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