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.