Edith Halpert

Edith Halpert or Edith Gregor Halpert (née Edith Gregoryevna Fivoosiovitch; 1900–1970) was a pioneering New York City dealer of American modern art and American folk art.

Early years Halpert was born Edith Gregoryevna Fivoosiovitch to Gregor and Frances Lucom Fivoosiovitch in Odessa (then Russia, now Ukraine) on April 25, 1900. She had a sister, Sonia, five years older. Shortly after the deadly pogroms of October 1905, Halpert immigrated to New York City in 1906 with her mother and sister (her father died in 1904 of tuberculosis). At this time the family name changed to Fivisovitch. She was also a member of the Whitney Studio Club and John Weischel's People's Art Guild, a radical artists' cooperative for which she served as treasurer.

In 1917, she met the American painter Samuel Halpert through the People's Art Guild, and they married the following year. However, Halpert continued to work to support her household while Samuel stayed home to paint. In 1925, they lived at the Maison Watteau in Montparnasse, then Paris's liveliest artist community. The following summer, the Halperts stayed at the artist colony founded by Hamilton Easter Field in Ogunquit, Maine. They rented a cottage from Robert Laurent, and mingled with other American artists who were residing there that summer: Stefan Hirsch, Bernard Karfiol, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Katherine Schmidt, Niles Spencer, and Marguerite and William Zorach, all of whom would later join her gallery. Halpert had earned a substantial salary and was appointed to the board of directors. In early brochures, Halpert and Goldsmith described their mission thus: "The Downtown Gallery has no prejudice for any one school. Its selection is driven by quality — by what is enduring — not by what is in vogue." In a press release, Halpert referred to the new gallery as “a modest moment in American Art.”

Fortifying The Downtown Gallery Halpert's business acumen helped her manage prices, and encourage collectors of modest means. After buying out Goldsmith in 1935, Halpert winnowed her stable of artists down to twelve, and focused on profitability. In 1940, the gallery relocated to 43 East 51st Street and, in 1945, she moved again, this time to 32 East 51st Street.

Halpert also worked to attract artists formerly represented by Alfred Stieglitz who died in 1946. She also took on artists' estates, including one from former Stieglitz artist Arthur Dove. In 1941, Halpert and "her friend Alain Locke, the writer and theorist of black culture, Halpert organized Negro Art in America, a survey of 41 artists that was the first such exhibition in a New York gallery. which is now owned jointly by MOMA and Washington D.C.'s Phillips Collection.

After 1936, all of Halpert's artists were eventually transferred, without the artists' consent to the Alan Gallery, led by Halpert's assistant director Charles Alan. The Downtown Gallery relocated one last time to the Ritz Tower Concourse at 465 Park Avenue in 1965.

Contributions to the art world Halpert served as organizer and director of the First Municipal Exhibition of American Art, Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1929. Her work with the WPA Federal Art Project took her to Washington D.C. in the summer of 1936 to develop the Exhibition and Allocation Program, which facilitated nationwide circulation for works from regional art centers. In 1937, she formed the Bureau for Architectural Sculpture and Murals, a central clearing-house from which architects could review and select work by artists and sculptors experienced in working in architectural settings (similar in mission to her Daylight Gallery). Halpert served as curator of the art section of the American National Exhibition, sponsored by the United States Information Agency and the U.S. Department of Commerce; she traveled to the Soviet Union with the exhibition, installed the show, and gave daily gallery talks in Russian.

In 1952, to promote art history, Halpert established the Edith Gregor Halpert Foundation. Its activities included assisting universities to fund scholarships for the study of contemporary American art and championing the rights of artists to control the sale and reproduction of their work. In recognition of her dedication to the arts, Halpert received the Art in America Award in 1959, a USIA Citation for Distinguished Service in 1960, and the First Annual International Silver Prize from the University of Connecticut for "distinguished contribution to the arts" in 1968.

Exhibitions from Halpert's collection

American Modernism: The First Wave, Painting from 1903-1933, presented at Brandeis University Museum of Art, 1963 Six Decades of American Art, shown at Leicester Galleries, London, 1965 Image to Abstraction, held at Amon Carter Museum, 1967 Edith Halpert and the Downtown Gallery, exhibited at the University of Connecticut, 1968. The Edith Gregor Halpert Collection was eventually sold at auction by Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 1973. The Jewish Museum's 2019 exhibition Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art included 100 pieces of Downtown Gallery-related American modern and folk art, as well as items from her personal collection.