The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert And the Making of the Modern Art Market
by Lindsay Pollock
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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 show more 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. show lessTags
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I enjoyed the book and learned a great deal about artists that were new to me. I spent almost as much time on Google reading about the people in the book. The only problem I had keeping things straight was that the chapters were both loosely chronological and topical, so the time that things happened jumped around a bit. I guess I was expecting a birth to death time sequence. Once I realized how Pollock was structuring the narrative, the confusion dissipated. Overall, I was fascinated by the story.
I started this and loved it. It has gotten lost in the stacks since. Hopefully I pick it back up and finish it soon!
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