Edith Gregor Halpert—dealer extraordinaire

If Edith Gregor Halpert's Downtown Gallery, which occupied four separate locations in New York City between 1926 and 1970, could be likened to anything, it would be to that teetering and tottering apparatus known as the seesaw. On one side sat cutting-edge and therefore underappreciated contemporary artists such as Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Ben Shahn, Jacob Lawrence, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, along with dozens of anonymous eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American folk painters and artisans. On the other side sat finicky but prescient clients, among them Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Duncan Phillips, Wright Ludington, Frank Crowninshield, Roy Neuberger, and an astonishing number of museums located from New York City to Los Angeles and everywhere in between. Sitting squarely in the middle and always trying to tinker with the balance of things was the enigmatic, beautiful, feisty, often brilliant, but always larger-than-life Halpert. How she accomplished all she did with the many players who floated in and out of her gallery, became her friends, lovers, and enemies but never her confidantes, is the subject of an engaging new biography with the unfortunate title The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market, written by Lindsay Pollock.

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Halpert was a controlling woman with an insatiable ego, so it is no surprise that she was mindful about keeping a paper trail that chronicled the heady days when New York City emerged as the center of the art world. In so doing, she squirreled away and later deposited at the Archives of American Art (part of the Smithsonian Institution) what Pollock describes as "hundreds of thousands of letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, sales slips, press releases, and other materials" that record the history of the Downtown Gallery.

Born Ginda Fivoosiovitch in Odessa, Russia, in 1899 or 1900, Halpert immigrated to the United States in 1906 with her widowed mother and sister. She was in her own words, "a nasty little kid." They settled in Harlem, which, by happenstance, was not far from the National Academy of Design. Lying about her age Halpert, who was only about fourteen at the time, enrolled in the academy as Edith Georgiana Fein. A year or so later she found work (this time lying about her age and her experience) in retailing, working first at Bloomingdale's and then at Macy's and Stern Brothers. These positions taught her much about marketing and sales.

She learned about art by frequenting Alfred Stieglitz's gallery (known as 291), the Montross Gallery, and the Whitney Studio Club founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Here she met many established and emerging artists, among them Sam Halpert, whom she quickly married. Interludes in Europe and Ogunquit, Maine, with her husband rapidly persuaded Halpert to extricate herself from the marriage. She returned to the city and decided to open a gallery featuring the work of aspiring artists, taking on Berthe Goldsmith, a new friend, as a partner. They set up at 113 West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village, and designed the interior to resemble a domestic setting so that prospective buyers could envision the art in their own homes. When the gallery opened on November 6, 1926, its mission statement, crafted by Halpert, an astute wordsmith, announced: "Our gallery has no special prejudice for any school. Its selection is directed by what's enduring--not by what is in vogue." Right from the start there were oddities and innovations: she allowed extended payments; she set up a system whereby customers could rent art by the month; she revealed buyers' names on the receipts she sent to artists; the gallery picked up the cost of printing invitations, catalogues, and the parties that went along with the openings; she established a room where artists and collectors could gather in the evening for coffee (and cocktails during Prohibition); and she organized traveling exhibitions for department stores across the country.

The turning point for the gallery, and for Halpert, took place in January 1928, when she sold a piece to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship in which Halpert advised her client in three areas: recent and contemporary European paintings, American paintings, and folk art. In October 1931 Halpert and Goldsmith, later joined by Holger Cahill (who became one of Halpert's several lovers), formed the American Folk Art Gallery as a separate entity. Eventually the proceeds from the sale of folk portraits, theorem paintings, chalkware figures, weathervanes, whirligigs, decoys, and other pieces of folk art underwrote Halpert's purchase of a salt-box house in Newtown, Connecticut.

At the age of forty, Halpert moved her gallery uptown. From this new space at 43 East Fifty-first Street, she became a champion of black artists, among them Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin. In 1945 she moved across the street to a five-story town house at 32 East Fifty-first Street. At Stieglitz's death, Halpert pressed some of his most established artists to move to her gallery, eventually landing Marin, O'Keeffe, and Dove.