Edith Gregor Halpert, the pioneering art dealer, wearing a brooch and ring designed for her by Charles Sheeler, in a photograph for Life magazine in 1952. She is joined by artists she was promoting that year: Charles Oscar, Robert Knipschild, Jonah Kinigstein, Wallace Reiss, Carroll Cloar and Herbert Katzman. Credit…Estate of Louis Faurer; Time-Life Archive/Getty Images; via The Jewish Museum.

… Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970), was a formidable, feisty and sometimes manipulative self-starter with an ecumenical eye, a passion for art and an inborn instinct for sales and promotion. Halpert was central to establishing the market for between-the-wars American art and thought that everyone should own art. She liked to keep prices low, would sell on the installment plan and staged annual holiday sales. She also thought that anyone could make art, an idea that was crucial to the folk art revival of the 1930s. For her time, she was unusually open to artists of color and, to some extent, women.

(Roberta Smith, “A Forgotten Pioneer’s Art World Is Resurrected at the Jewish Museum,” NYTimes, 11-7-19)

Halpert’s low-balling of price, and her notion that “everyone should own art,” mark her as a visionary for her time and a relic for ours.

(c) 2029 JMN