Review: Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above

Installation view, Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above, at Alexandre Gallery, April 30 - June 11.

What a wonderful time to discover the sly and seductive charm of Edith Schloss’s largely under-the-radar art, writing, and life. All of it is so apt, entertaining, and informative that it’s impossible to decide what should be quoted for insight or fun. For example, the novelist Jane Bowles sets the stage, speaking from the Chelsea loft on 21st Street that Schloss shared with her husband of 13 years photographer Rudy Burkhardt:

I know that everyone here has slept at one time or another with someone or another in this loft. We stared at one another, old lovers new husbands, this one having lived with that, secretly or not, summer or winter, in rain or shine—Bill Elaine, Edwin, Fairfield, Anne and Anne, Jean, Ruth, Pit, Larry, Milton, Alex, tess, Walter, Paul, Fritz, Nell, Ilse, Marisol, Bob, Jimmy, Jane, Joe, Rudy, and me. It was uncanny. It was true. Everyone was there.

The German-born artist, who died in 2011, documented off-handedly her life as a refuge first in New York, in 1942, and then Rome in 1962, in an insightful posthumous memoir Loft Generation: from de Kooning to Twombly Portraits and Sketches 1942–2011.

Schloss also left us with an ebullient body of warm and eccentric paintings created in the 1960s and ’70s on the island of Spezia that were recently on view at Alexandre Gallery’s new fresh-white downtown space. In these, the objects are the characters sharply profiled—the little boats, beach balls, a lone bird, a bowl of fruit, close ups of primary-colored lollypop-like flowers pose head on. The painting Spring Green (1967) poignantly features two Gustonesque figures as objects, one with baby, stretched out flat on the grass.

Review: Edith Schloss's Deep Cheer

Edith Schloss, Blue Italian Skies Above, 1968, oil on canvas, 11 3/4 x 31 1/2 inches

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson

As the title “Blue Italian Skies Above” suggests, walking into the exhibition of Edith Schloss’s paintings now at Alexandre Gallery produces a kind of pastoral contentment. Many of the paintings depict a swatch of Italian beach to which she decamped from Rome – her primary home from 1962, when she left New York, until her death in 2011. A tranquil blue seems dominant in her palette, and the phenomena she presents in her calculatedly primitive pastiches – flowers, butterflies, tablecloths, tchotchkes, the sun, the moon, occasionally what looks phallic – can all be associated with good vibes of one kind or another. Don’t be fooled into thinking she was a shallow, acquiescent Pollyanna, though. Lurking in that casual lightness is a distinct quality of mortality and limitation.

The sense of that quality is not tragic but rather stoic – maybe wistful but resolutely short of sentimental. As she reveals in her posthumously published memoir The Loft Generation, she was far from clueless. She decried the diminution of women in the “what the fuck man’s land” of the New York art scene in the 1950s, and later the difficulty of being taken seriously as an artist while earning a living as an art writer and critic. When her work comes under closer scrutiny, the blue cheer of the 20 paintings yields to mood shifts, conveyed by changing seasons, weather, or time of day, rendered with elegant simplicity, and echoed in Schloss’s titles.

“Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above,” Alexandre Gallery, 291 Grand Street, LES, New York, NY. Through June 4, 2022.

News: Estate of Edith Schloss now Represented by Alexandre Gallery

Alexandre Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of works by the artist (1919-2011), marking its representation of the estate. Examining Schloss’s work from the 1960s and 70s, this exhibition presents a collection of never-before-seen works, many of which were produced during the artist’s summers overlooking the bay of La Spezia, Italy. Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above, Paintings from the 1960s and 70s will be on view from April 30-June 4 and will be accompanied by a catalogue with new scholarship by Jason Andrew. Public reception will be Saturday, April 30 3-5p.

Bold and at times brash, Schloss ingested the style and mentality of the Abstract Expressionists among which she was intrinsically linked. Her work spans painting, assemblage, collage, watercolor, and drawing and embraces the intimate, the primitive, and the profound. Guided by a delight in pure color and childlike curiosity, her playful imaginings of still lifes, laid over vibrant renderings of views out of open windows onto the Mediterranean sea, are a joyful celebration of common wonders. These works, manifest her new-found acquaintance with Giorgio Morandi, feature tchotchkes collected and arranged, animating the symbolism of each item: “I look at them and the weather before me,” she said, “and try to have clear ideas about it all and the world, and to put it down in the simplest color and line […] Abstract art? Figurative art? All art is a fusion of the real outside, and that which is inside us.”

Born in Germany, Schloss immigrated to New York City via London in 1942, where she became an observant member of the abstract expressionist movement and part of the thriving community of artists and intellectuals that found camaraderie in the neglected lofts of downtown. These included artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and poets John Asberry, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. She was among a minority of women artists in the New York School of the 1950s and 60s, and was featured in the historic 1961 exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1946, she married photographer Rudy Burckhardt and had a son Jacob Burckhardt. When the couple separated, Schloss “fled” New York for Rome. Expecting to stay on only a few months, she remained there a lifetime befriending Cy Twombly and mentoring Francesca Woodman. As a renegade expat, became a noted transatlantic correspondent of art criticism and continued to write and paint until she died in 2011 at the age of 92. 

In 2021, Schloss’s long-awaited, captivating posthumous memoir, The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly; Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and included in New York Times’ Top Books of 2021. The book received numerous favorable reviews: Alexandra Jacobs of The New York Times called it “A glowing jewel of a book,” Jed Perl for the New York Review of Books championed it for capturing “the heat of those times,” and Jamie Hood for Vulture wrote, “Schloss extends the reach of the ghostly archives of an artist, a scene, a moment.”

“I am pleased to celebrate the announcement of this representation and exhibition. Alexandre Gallery has long advocated for the likes of Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Helen Torr. Edith’s life and work will now be aligned with these legacies and recognized as essential in the course of American Modernism.” —Jacob Burckhardt, Estate of Edith Schloss

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Edith Schloss, “Spring Green,” 1967, Oil on canvas, 27 3/4 x 23 3/4 in (70.5 x 60.3 cm)

Edith Schloss was born in 1919 in Offenbach, Germany, and immigrated to New York City during World War II. In 1962 she moved to Italy, where she lived and worked until she died in 2011.

She studied at Shrewsbury Technical College, Shropshire, UK (1940), Boston School of Practical Arts, Boston, MA (1941), Art Students League, New York (with Harry Sternberg, Will Barnet and Morris Kantor) (1942-46), and the New School of Social Research, New York (1948).

Schloss actively exhibited at galleries throughout her lifetime, including Ashby Gallery, New York (1947), Workshop Gallery, New York (1959), Tanager Gallery, New York (1960), Galleria Aleph, Rome (1964), Galleria Il Segno, Rome (1968, 1974), Green Mountain Gallery, New York (1970, 1972, 1974), Ingber Gallery, New York (1974, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1987, 1989), Galleria II Gabbiano, La Spezia (1983, 1986), Galleria Giulia Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2008, 2009). In 2015, the first posthumous retrospective in New York was mounted at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, curated by Jason Andrew. Selected works from the artist’s Rignalla Series were exhibited at the Meredith Ward Fine Art in 2018.

Select institutional survey exhibitions include Klingspor-Museum, Offenbach, Germany (1990), The Keats-Shelley House, Rome (1993), Il Museo del Louvre, Rome (1997), St. Stephen’s School, Rome (2000), and Centro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea della Spezia (CAMEC) (2013).

Schloss’s work can be found in prominent private collections in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney, Rome, Milan, Ferrara and La Spezia. Her work is represented in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Wiesbaden; and the Offenbacher Stadtmuseum, Offenbach, Germany, to name a few. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, among others.

Twentieth-Century Woman: A pioneer of New York’s loft scene gets a long-overdue introduction.

by Jamie Hood

Early in her book The Loft Generation, the artist and critic Edith Schloss recalls the painting that changed her life. Schloss — a recent German-Jewish émigré to the United States — was at a party in a New Jersey farmhouse in the early 1940s when she came upon it: “It was green and gray and black. In it leaned a curvilinear shape like a number eight, or two sliced 0s, egg-like shapes snugly fitting. There was something still and clear about the little thing … I’d never seen anything like it.”

The artist Fairfield Porter found Schloss there, entranced, and offered to introduce her to the artist behind the painting. Back in New York, he led her to a loft on 22nd Street: “When the door was finally opened, the man who stood there looked aghast at Fairfield and me,” she writes, “But then he caught himself, and with quick, cheerful politeness asked us inside.” Schloss was a disappointment, a mere art student. The then little-known Bill De Kooning was the man inside the studio; he’d expected Porter to summon a power-player, someone to rally around his blossoming career. But it was Schloss who got there first.

You’ve likely never heard of Edith Schloss. Although the New York Sun identified her as “an artist best known for knowing everyone who counted in Manhattan’s legendary postwar art scene,” she has been largely exiled from popular memory, without even a Wikipedia page. But Schloss, who died in Rome in 2011, once lived and worked in the center of the center of midcentury New York’s most illustrious culturati. The Loft Generation: From the De Koonings to Twombly is a patchwork tapestry of on-the-scene recollections of a radically transformative era for American (particularly New York) art and culture.

New York Was Very Heaven

By Andy Grundberg

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011 by Edith Schloss; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $32

The Loft Generation has several things to recommend it: an inspired title (that’s “Loft,” not “Lost”); a cast of characters essential to postwar American art (not only the de Koonings and Cy Twombly but also Fairfield Porter, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Harold Rosenberg, among others); a female author who knew them well and whose presence on the scene has been largely forgotten, along with her contributions to it; and finally, a gripping story about a group of young artists, many of them immigrants like Schloss, who reshaped contemporary art and in the process made New York the center of the art world.

New York’s Midcentury Art Scene Springs to Life in ‘The Loft Generation’

By Alexandra Jacobs

Many prophesied the demise of New York City during the Great and Temporary Exodus of 2020. But none had quite the dramatic vision of Jack Tworkov, the abstract expressionist painter, in the middle of the previous century. “Imagine a great catastrophe. And all this mowed down,” he mused then, looking at photographs of buildings, envisioning rust and dust. “And tourists wandering around in all that emptiness — where was the Flatiron, the Empire State — looking for past grandeur. Imagine good old New York someday just like Egypt.”

Tworkov is one of scores who come bearing aperçus in the German American writer and artist Edith Schloss’s memoir, “The Loft Generation,” discovered in rough-draft form after her death in 2011. It’s been polished into a glowing jewel of a book by several editors including Mary Venturini, who worked with her in later years at a magazine for expats in Rome, and Schloss’s son, Jacob Burckhardt.

New Publication: The Loft Generation

A bristling and brilliant memoir of the mid-twentieth-century New York School of painters and their times by the renowned artist and critic Edith Schloss, who, from the early years, was a member of the group that shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly is a firsthand account by an artist at the center of a landmark era in American art. Edith Schloss writes about the artists, poets, and musicians who were part of the postwar art movements in America and about her life as an artist in America and later in Italy, where she continued to paint and write until her death in 2011.

Schloss was born in Germany and moved to New York City during World War II. She became part of a thriving community of artists and intellectuals, from Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Larry Rivers to John Cage and Frank O’Hara. She married the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. She was both a working artist and an incisive art critic, and was a candid and gimlet-eyed observer of the close-knit community that was redefining American art. In later life she lived in Italy and spent time with artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Cy Twombly, Meret Oppenheim, and Francesca Woodman.

In The Loft Generation, Schloss creates a rare and irreplaceable up-close record of an era of artistic innovation and the colorful characters who made it happen. There is no other book like it. Her firsthand information is indispensable reading for all critics and researchers of that vital period in American art.

Reviews

“Schloss brilliantly conveys her experiences . . . Thoughtfully edited by Venturini, [The Loft Generation] combines Schloss’s personal memoir with her art criticism to provide a riveting firsthand account of the daily lives, complex social interactions, and marital spats of artists . . . Rich in granular detail and rendered in eloquent and captivating prose, this is an intimate look at a pivotal era in its formative stages and offers an invaluable source for the study of one of the great art movements.”

—Publishers Weekly

"Shrewdly observant, Schloss conveys in painterly prose the spirited individuals whose lives she shared and the worlds they inhabited . . . A captivating memoir of a life in art."

—Kirkus Reviews

“Zestily precise and deeply knowledgeable . . . With preternatural recall, a discerning eye, keen ear, and hard-won insights, Schloss shares spirited, funny, wry and poignant tales . . . Intrepid, attentive, judicious, and radiantly expressive, Schloss presents an exhilarating perspective on a salient chapter in art history.”

—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"I am tempted to say Edith Schloss’s Loft Generation is remarkable, but remarkable seems inadequate to describe it. Schloss’s memoir of life in New York during the heyday of the Abstract Expressionist movement and her subsequent expat years in Italy is wise, witty, and wild in equal measures. Writing from the position of the ultimate insider about a world that we are only beginning to understand and fully appreciate, she introduces readers to the artists and writers and composers who became part of her life – Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Rudy Burckhardt, Edwin Denby, Paul and Jane Bowles, John Cage, Frank O’Hara, among many, many others. And she describes the romance that is the life of the artist, despite poverty, monstrous political and social turmoil, and changing artistic fortunes. By the end of her story, which is so intimate and so true, we are left feeling as though we are part of that world, too. Quite simply, Schloss transports us, and that is the most any writer can hope to do. No, remarkable does not begin to describe her memoir. The Loft Generation is superb."

—Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art

“This indispensable eyewitnessing of a crucial period in American culture is wonderfully alive, entertaining, and beautifully written, with a dazzling mix of the personal and the aesthetic. Warmly honest, perceptive, and humane, Edith Schloss’s memoir is itself a work of art.”

—Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay

Review (via NYTimes): Edith Schloss at Meredith Ward

Edith Schloss "Rignalla," 1967, Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 21 1/2 in.

We are very pleased that the exhibition, Edith Schloss, organized by Artist Estate Studio at Meredith Ward Fine Art has been reviewed in The New York Times by Robert Smith.

READ FULL REVIEW HERE >

Exhibition News: Edith Schloss at Meredith Ward Fine Art opens Feb 8

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Meredith Ward Fine Art is pleased to present Edith Schloss: By the Sea, an exhibition of 20 paintings and works on paper painted in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s (February 8 – March 30, 2018). This is the first exhibition of Schloss's work at the gallery and includes several paintings that will be on view for the first time. "Schloss's colorful and whimsical still lifes are a revelation," said Meredith Ward, President of the gallery. "They add an entirely new dimension to our understanding of figurative painting in the 1960s and 1970s." This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Edith Schloss and with the support of Artist Estate Studio, LLC.

Intrinsically linked to the milieu of postwar American art, Edith Schloss was an integral member of the Chelsea-New York art world, which flourished around the New York School and include photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt (whom she married in 1947) and the Jane Street Group around Nell Blaine.

In 1962, having separated from Burckhardt, Schloss with her young son in tow, left New York City for Italy. There, with Rome as her base, she sought out the legendary Giorgio Morandi, befriending him and drawing inspiration from his subtle and calculated still lifes. Among the first paintings Schloss produced in Italy were a series of still lifes that are the focus of this special exhibition. In these paintings, which border on the bittersweet, fragile, and naïve, Schloss lines up vases, teapots, flowers, and other objects and paints them against the Mediterranean Sea.
These whimsical works display vitality, inventiveness, and a distinctive painterly abstraction.

Schloss wrote of her work, "What I really do is what any painter worth his salt has always done, I abstract color and line from life around me, and make another life out of it." Among the highlights of the exhibition are two paintings titled Rignalla, which are being exhibited here for the first time. Over several summers, Schloss accompanied her lover, the composer/musician Alvin Curran, to Florence where he had a gig playing Dixieland Jazz at the Red Garter. From her room along the via di Rignalla, she painted several still lifes, which became mementos of her sojourns there.

About Edith Schloss
Edith Schloss (1919-2011) was born in Offenbach, Germany. As a young woman she traveled extensively in Europe. Working as an au pair in London during the Blitz, she was evacuated to the United States and landed in New York City. There, she met the political refugee Heinz Langerhans, who introduced her to Bertolt Brecht, and other intellectuals at The New School for Social Research.

From 1942 to 1946, she studied at the Art Students League with Will Barnet, Harry Sternberg, and Morris Kantor. In 1945, Schloss met Willem de Kooning through her friend, the painter Fairfield Porter. Around the same time, she became connected with a group of artists, poets and filmmakers in Chelsea, including Ellen and Walter Auerbach, Nell Blaine, Edwin Denby, and Rudy Burchkhardt. She joined the Jane Street Group, New York's first artist cooperative gallery, and in 1947 had her first one-person show at the Ashby Gallery.

Schloss married Rudy Burckhardt in 1947 and the couple spent summers with Fairfield Porter and his family in Maine. In 1962, she and Burkhardt separated, and Schloss moved to Italy. Schloss’s paintings have been shown in exhibitions in Rome and New York and her work is represented in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; the Hessisches Landsmuseum, Wiesbaden; and the Offenbacher Stadtmuseum, Offenbach, Germany.

In 2015, a landmark retrospective of work by Edith Schloss was curated by Jason Andrew and held at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York. That exhibition marked the first show of the artist’s work in New York in twenty-five years. This exhibition at Meredith Ward, with a focused look on the works from the 1960s, continues the momentum and renewed interest in the artist’s work.

This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Edith Schloss and with the support of Artist Estate Studio, LLC. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online catalogue.

About Meredith Ward Fine Art
Meredith Ward Fine Art opened in 2004 specializing in American art from the 19th century to the present. The gallery is the exclusive representative of the estates of John Marin, Larry Day, Steve Wheeler, and Flora Crockett. Meredith Ward Fine Art is located at 44 East 74th Street in New York City and is open to the public Tuesday through Friday, 10am to 5:30pm and Saturday by appointment.

For more information or images, contact Julia Wilcox at 212-744-7306 or
info@meredithwardfineart.com | www.meredithwardfineart.com