Bettina Grossman, artistic fixture at Chelsea Hotel, has died
It might seem unlikely, upon seeing Bettina Grossman pushing her shopping cart filled with artwork outside the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, that she was an accomplished artist with a once-promising career.
Grossman was unusual even by the standards of the Chelsea, the storied haven for quirky artists. Her studio apartment, Room 503, at the end of a long fifth-floor hallway, had become so crowded with her accumulated artwork — largely abstract, highly conceptual drawings, sculptures and photographs — that she had been displaced from her own living space. She slept in her hallway on a lawn chair.
“She was eccentric with a capital E,” said Robert Lambert, a painter who lived down the hall from Grossman at the Chelsea, which over the years was home to the likes of Mark Twain, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.
“Her room was like an Egyptian tomb,” Lambert added in an interview. “It looked like a wreck, but you blow off the dust and there’s nothing but beautiful sculptural treasures.” For much of the 1950s and ’60s, Grossman worked as an artist in Europe. But after a series of career disappointments, she isolated herself as a permanent resident at the Chelsea for a half-century, fiercely guarding both her privacy and the trove of art she had produced in her prime in New York and Europe.
She refused guests and kept her apartment door secured with numerous heavy locks.
Grossman died, Nov. 2, of respiratory failure at a Brooklyn care center, where she was rehabilitating after a fall several months ago, her niece Aliza Green said. She was 94.
Toward the end of Grossman’s life, she and her work became more widely known. She was the subject of two documentaries and allowed a small circle of her fellow artists to have her pieces cataloged and exhibited in shows in New York and Germany. Her work is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and at MoMA PS1 in Queens.
Bettina Grossman was born, Sept. 28, 1927, in Brooklyn to Saul and Pauline Grossman and grew up with three siblings in an Orthodox Jewish home in the Borough Park section.
Her father owned a music store in Manhattan but did not encourage his children to pursue the arts, her brother Morty said in an interview.
“How she got the talent, I don’t know — I guess God put it into her,” he said.
After studying commercial art in high school, she became a designer of neckties, sheets, pillowcases and the like for a textile manufacturer and had saved enough money by her early 20s to move to Europe. There she pursued her art career and eschewed her youthful nickname, Betty, going simply by the single name Bettina.
“She chose her name and created her persona,” said Green.
Grossman became an exacting craftswoman. She traveled to Carrera, Italy, to select marble for her sculptures. She studied stained glass with a master in France.