Edith Halpert (born Edith Gregoryevna Fivoosiovitch)

Edith Halpert was an important dealer of twentieth-century art in the United States. Her influential Downtown Gallery, established in 1926 and predicated on the models of European contemporaries such as the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard, was the first commercial art space in Greenwich Village dedicated exclusively to the work of living artists, particularly Asian, Black, and Latinx Americans. Halpert helped to shape the field of modernist art not only by promoting artists marginalized by dominant institutions, but also by developing innovative marketing tools targeting middle-income art enthusiasts.

Halpert established the Downtown Gallery at 113 West 13th Street with funds from her position as an executive at the S. W. Straus & Company investment bank. She utilized the remodeled brownstone’s architecture effectively, designating genres of artwork to specific spaces and constructing the Daylight Gallery in 1930 in the rear of the building to showcase twentieth-century artworks to their utmost advantage in natural light. In 1934 Halpert organized the “Mile of Art” exhibition at Radio City Music Hall with the support of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Nelson Rockefeller to assist artists struggling during the Great Depression. She relocated the Downtown Gallery uptown to 51st Street in 1940 and to 57th Street in 1965. Several works now in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art traveled through the Downtown Gallery, including paintings by Stuart Davis (Men and Machine; 1934), Charles Demuth (Red Poppies; 1929), Charles Sheeler (Americana; 1931), and a 1918 collage by Max Weber, The Apollo in Matisse’s Studio.

Halpert was one of the first gallerists to exhibit and acquire the work of artists of African and Asian descent, including Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, and Tseng Yu-Ho. In 1941 she organized American Negro Art, the first commercial exhibition of works by African American artists in New York City, curated in collaboration with the philosopher and critic Alain Locke. Halpert and Locke presented nineteenth-century artists such as Robert S. Duncanson and Henry Ossawa Tanner, as well as academically trained living artists such as Romare Bearden, Sargent Johnson, and Augusta Savage, alongside their autodidact contemporaries including William Edmondson and Horace Pippin. In conjunction with the exhibition, Halpert established the Negro Art Fund to place works by artists of African descent in American museums in order to address the systemic disregard for Black artists’ work. The following year she organized a retrospective for Kuniyoshi as a public show of solidarity and support; as part of the U.S. government’s systematic program to detain individuals of Japanese descent following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the artist had been classified as an “enemy alien” and placed under house arrest.

The ferocity of Halpert’s loyalty to the artists she represented was matched by her belief in the importance of freedom of expression. Halpert vigorously defended artists Ben Shahn and Jack Levine, who had come under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1959 for presenting their works in the American National Exhibition in Moscow that same year. Halpert advocated in the press for their rights to freedom of expression regardless of their political affiliation or aesthetic style and even called on President Eisenhower himself to intervene directly.

Halpert’s clients ranged from elite arts patrons like Duncan Phillips, who operated the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, to amateur collectors. Nearly half of her sales were to first-time art buyers, and Halpert adopted a variety of marketing techniques and purchasing options to attract middle-class patrons. One of Halpert’s most important clients was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller; more than one quarter of the two thousand works she donated to the Museum of Modern Art were purchased with Halpert’s advice or through the Downtown Gallery directly.

Halpert worked until her death in 1970, after which the gallery quickly shuttered since she had not designated an heir. Halpert’s personal collection of more than one thousand paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculptures was sold at auction by Sotheby Parke-Bernet in 1973.