Edith Schloss

Edith Schloss (July 20, 1919 – December 21, 2011) was a German-born American artist, art critic and author, primarily known for abstract paintings and assemblages. She received art training first in her native Offenbach, Germany, and then, successively, in Florence, London, Boston, and New York. She spent the early part of her career working during the cold months in Manhattan and during the warm ones in coastal New England and then spent the last five decades of her life in Italy where she wintered in Rome and painted during the rest of the year in Liguria or Tuscany. While living in Italy she collaborated with the avant-garde composer Alvin Curran who later became her partner and lifelong friend.

Schloss's paintings were mostly small landscapes and still lifes in oil or watercolor. In 1947 a critic for Art News called her paintings "light-hearted abstractions" and in 1974 a critic for the New York Times described her watercolors as having a "general aura of poetic fantasy" As a child she attended a local Volksschule and also received avant-garde art education in a class run by a man who taught collage but did not, as she later recalled, ever show his students how to draw or paint.