DAVID HERMAN

THERE IS a fascinating work in a new exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum, Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art, which features a Star of David in one corner and an image of Abraham Lincoln in another. Jewishness and a great American icon come together. This perfectly captures the story of Edith Halpert, a Jewish immigrant who transformed American art in the mid-20th century.

She was the first important female gallery owner in the US. The New York Times recently called her “arguably New York’s most powerful dealer of contemporary art” from the early ‘30s to the mid ‘50s.

In 1926 she opened the Downtown Gallery, the first commercial art space in New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village. She was a classic outsider: a woman, an immigrant and a Jew. She regularly exhibited work by women, Jews and immigrants, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Ben Shahn, who later became household names, but also by a new generation of black artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin. She championed modern American art at a time when the New York art world was looking to Europe, especially Paris.

Born Edith Gregoryevna Fivoosiovitch in Odessa in 1900, she came to New York City with her mother and sister in 1906 (her father had recently died of TB). When she was just seventeen she met the artist Samuel Halpert, another Russian immigrant, and they married the following year. She worked at Bloomingdale’s