Overview

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 colour photographs, this is biography at its finest, an unforgettable story of class, money, vanity, jealousy, and tragic loss.

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9781586485122

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Reviews

The Downtown Gallery depended, at different times, on the market, on patrons and on the state, to fund its roster of artists. Pollock does a wonderful job of showing how Halpert appealed to each in turn. She makes the business of running a gallery as interesting to the reader as to its owner, and part of the charm of the book lies in its description of the Greenwich Village bohemianism that drew Halpert to the art world. Pollock has built up a picture of a brilliant businesswoman who was a prime orchestrator of the increasing success of avant-garde American art in the first half of the 20th century. Daily Telegraph

""The Downtown Gallery depended, at different times, on the market, on patrons and on the state, to fund its roster of artists. Pollock does a wonderful job of showing how Halpert appealed to each in turn. She makes the business of running a gallery as interesting to the reader as to its owner, and part of the charm of the book lies in its description of the Greenwich Village bohemianism that drew Halpert to the art world."" ""Pollock has built up a picture of a brilliant businesswoman who was a prime orchestrator of the increasing success of avant-garde American art in the first half of the 20th century."" Daily Telegraph""

Author Information

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.

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