Edith Schloss
Edith Schloss was a German-born American artist, art critic and author, primarily known for abstract paintings and assemblages. She received art training first in her native Offenbach, Germany, and then, successively, in Florence, London, Boston, and New York. She spent the early part of her career working during the cold months in Manhattan and during the warm ones in coastal New England and then spent the last five decades of her life in Italy where she wintered in Rome and painted during the rest of the year in Liguria or Tuscany. While living in Italy she collaborated with the avant-garde composer Alvin Curran who later became her partner and lifelong friend.
Schloss's paintings were mostly small landscapes and still lifes in oil or watercolor. In 1947 a critic for Art News called her paintings "light-hearted abstractions" and in 1974 a critic for the New York Times described her watercolors as having a "general aura of poetic fantasy" She also made small boxes with found-object contents. in a review published in Arts Magazine In 1974, a critic described her boxes as "genuinely artless, neither rarefied nor precious".
Early life and training
Schloss was born in Offenbach am Main, Germany, on July 20, 1919, the first-born child in a prosperous Jewish family. Her parents were Ludwig and Martha Schloss. As a child she attended a local Volksschule and also received avant-garde art education in a class run by a man who taught collage but did not, as she later recalled, ever show his students how to draw or paint. When she was eleven years old her family sent her for language instruction to a boarding school for girls in Nancy, France. At about this time she also spent time as a student in a vocational school in Frankfurt where she later remembered seeing Van Gogh's portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet at the Städel art museum. By 1936, as the persecution of German Jews kept her from further study in Germany, her parents sent her to Italy where she worked as an au pair and studied art with her employer, Professoressa Teresita Baldi. Recalling this period she later wrote, "The Uffizi was full of the best fairy tales on earth... what teenager is not moved by the cool tones and gentle stillness of the Primavera and The Birth of Venus?"Late in 1938 she left Fascist Italy for England. Then aged 19, she no longer received parental support, had little money, and possessed no more than could fit into one small suitcase. Her ability to travel had been restricted when Germany had invalidated all Jewish passports earlier that year. Determining that she would not return to Germany, Schloss found that she could enter the United Kingdom as a refugee. Arriving in London, she was taken in by a small group of self-exiled German socialists and, in return for room and board, helped its members prepare and distribute their publications. Soon thereafter she found employment, again as an au pair, working for a family in Shrewsbury. At that time she took classes in drawing nudes at the Shrewsbury Technical College. She later moved back to London where she found work minding the children of the German-born illustrator, Walter Trier, and found time to attend art classes and visit museums. She chafed under restrictions the UK government imposed on her as a stateless woman, and in the summer of 1940 obtained support from the American Friends Service Committee to obtain one of the relatively few U.S. immigration visas available to Jews fleeing Germany. Departing from Liverpool on the RMS Antonia, she arrived in Quebec City on September 28 and crossed to the U.S. at St. Albans, Vermont, traveling from there to Boston where she found work as a waitress to support herself while taking classes at the Boston School of Practical Art. While living in Boston she met and began living with another German refugee, Heinz Langerhans. A revolutionary socialist whose views aligned with the group that had helped Schloss in London, Langerhans introduced her to other similarly aligned self-exiled Germans. In 1942 the pair moved to Manhattan, finding apartments successively in Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In New York she studied at the New School for Social Research and attended lectures at Cooper Union while earning a living in a sequence of jobs in factories, newspapers, a photoengraving business, and again in a restaurant. She also enrolled at the Art Students League, because, as she later said, “anyone who wanted to be anyone” was studying there. At the League her teachers included Harry Sternberg, Will Barnet, Morris Kantor, and John Groth. She later said she learned most from Sternberg who once told her, "Never wait for that famous inspiration. Just go on steadily every day and you’ll get there." On another occasion he said, "Paint the sky red if you see it that way. Dare anything."
By 1944 Schloss and Langerhans were no longer living together. That year she moved into a loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan at 116 West 21st Street. The loft's previous tenant was a friend, the photographer Ellen Auerbach. Living nearby were artists Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Nell Blaine, and Jane Freilicher as were a filmmaker, Rudy Burckhardt and two poets, Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. Although he lived elsewhere, the painter Fairfield Porter had a studio on the same block. Porter, who shared socialist views with Langerhans, provided a bridge for Schloss between self-exiled Germans like Langerhans, and the bohemian art world in which Porter moved. A few months after she met Porter he brought her to Willem de Kooning's studio where she met him for the first time. Schloss later wrote about the encounter, saying the experience convinced her to change her approach to painting. In her words, she, "stopped looking out and tried to scoop shapes and colors from within myself."
Career in art
Schloss completed her studies at the Art Students League in 1946 and somewhat tentatively settled into a career in art. In her memoir she said at this time she sometimes saw herself as a painter and other times as a writer. Despite this ambivalence she devoted much time and effort to her art. From the mid-1940s through the next six decades her work would appear in 40 solo exhibitions and some 50 group shows. In August 1946 she participated in her first exhibition, a large annual held by Gloucester Society of Artists in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Reviewing the exhibition, a critic for ARTnews cited her contributions as outstanding. In the fall of 1946 her work appeared in a show organized by an artists' collective called the Jane Street Group. In 1944 Schloss's friend Nell Blaine had become a founding member of the group and on her advice Schloss joined about a year later. Other members included Hyde Solomon, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Albert Kresch, and Judith Rothschild. In December, when she participated in an exhibition held at the New York gallery run by the art teacher and abstract artist Carl Ashby, a critic for Art Digest called a painting of hers "appealing both in its surface technique and subject matter". The following year she was given a duo exhibition with her friend Cicely Aikman at the Ashby Gallery. Writing in the New York Times, critic Howard Devree praised a semi-abstract painting called "West Twenty-first Street" but was less enthusiastic about her non-objective work. Overall he found her paintings to be "earnest and vigorous". Reviewing this show, an ARTnews critic described her paintings as "light-hearted abstractions". In 1951 Schloss participated in the watershed 9th Street Art Exhibition. The show included painting and sculpture by 72 artists, including many of her friends from The Club, a group of like-minded artists formed in 1949. Although Schloss and quite a few other participants were not themselves abstract expressionists, others, like the de Koonings, were forerunners of that art movement.In the late 1940s and early 1950s she participated in duo and trio shows held by an artists' collective called the Pyramid Group. The artists in that group were mostly young and unknown and mostly associated with the Ashby Gallery. In addition to Schloss members included Cicely Aikman, Helen DeMott, Hyde Solomon, Paul Breslin, Al Blaustein, and Gordon Rothenberg. In 1949 an ARTnews critic drew attention to a painting of hers called "Between the World and the Weather" in a Pyramid Group show at the Riverside Museum, describing it as "a lyric abstraction". A 1955 duo exhibition that Schloss held with another Pyramid artist at the Hudson Guild drew favorable comments from a critic for Art Digest. Calling her work "simply and beautifully executed", the critic discussed elements of her style including its "feminine quality" and "delicate but firm handling".
In the early 1950s Schloss also began to participate in exhibitions at an artists' co-op called the Tanager Gallery. She continued her relationship with the Tanager until 1961. In that year a trio exhibition at Tanager with Lawrence Campbell and Gabriel Laderman drew an extensive review in ARTnews. Praising Schloss's "refreshing audacity", the ARTnews critic said the paintings had a "fidelity to form" and "an hypnotic visual allure", adding that they were "beautiful in a unique way". At this time she also began exhibiting with the American Abstract Artists group and continued to do so for the next few years. She made her first appearances in commercial galleries in 1956 when she participated in group shows at the Poindexter and the Kraushaar galleries. In 1959 she was given a solo exhibition at Constance Kane's Workshop Gallery where she showed small wooden boxes along with her paintings. This was probably her first solo in a commercial gallery. In reviewing it, a critic for Art Digest called her still lifes "tastefully decorative, sincere and pleasantly reminiscent of Chardin". The following year she mounted a solo exhibition at the Tanager Gallery and, with her friend Helen DeMott, organized a group exhibition called "American Still Life Painting Today" for a commercial gallery, the Peridot. Art Digest's critic said the two women had made excellent choices and Dore Ashton, in the New York Times, called Schloss's paintings "noteworthy". In 1961 Schloss participated in a major exhibition that was later understood to place assemblage as a significant artistic medium. The show contained 250 works by 150 artists dating from 1913. It attracted a good deal of critical attention including a review in the issue of Life magazine for October 20 of that year. A review by John Canaday of the New York Times used the terms "dazzler" and "spectacular" to describe it. One of the two box constructions that Schloss exhibited was pictured in the show's exhibition catalog.
In 1947 Schloss had married Rudy Burckhardt. In 1962 she separated from him and sailed to Italy with their twelve-year-old son Jacob. At first intending to travel for a few months, she eventually settled in Rome and retained it as her home base for the rest of her life. Most years, she would spend the warm months painting in Liguria or Tuscany and return to Rome during the colder ones. The Galleria Aleph in Rome gave her a solo exhibition of assemblages in 1964. A critic for a Rome paper called it the most entertaining of the city's current exhibitions. A year later the Galleria Scorpio, also in Rome, gave her a solo show of paintings in oil and watercolor. During the next 20 years she was given more than a dozen solo exhibitions in commercial galleries in Rome and other Italian cities. She also continued to send paintings and assemblages for exhibition in New York. These shows included solos at the Green Mountain Gallery and at the Ingber Gallery. A review in Arts Magazine said her watercolors in the 1974 Ingber exhibition were "delightful in their spontaneity".
In 1966 she contributed watercolors to an event called a "sonic portrait of the city of Rome". This was the first of a number of collaborations with the avant-garde composer Alvin Curran who later became her partner and lifelong friend. She was given her last solo exhibition at the Ingber Gallery in 1989. She continued to be given solo exhibitions in Rome during the first decade of the 21st century. A 1997 show at the high school in Rome from which her son had graduated was probably the first solo exhibition following her death. In 2015 the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York staged what was said to be the most comprehensive display of her work to date. Three years later Meredith Ward Fine Art mounted a retrospective focusing on her work of the 1960s and 1970s. Reviewing this show, Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, "At this point in her life, Schloss painted with consummate ease and abundant charm, sketching her subjects and applying color as needed." In 2022 Alexanre Gallery mounted a show that included works by artists who were her friends along with her own works. In 2023 one writer showed that the response to Schloss's work was not uniformly positive, writing, "Schloss was a good but not great painter. Today her work is of interest primarily for how she melded the influences of the two artists she most admired, Porter and Willem de Kooning."