Electra Havemeyer Webb and Edith Gregor Halpert: a collaboration in folk art collecting

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Henry Joyce

Research for the Shelburne Museum's newly reinterpreted folk art galleries, which opened in June 2002, revealed a significant collaboration between Electra Havemeyer Webb, the collector and founder of the museum, and the folk and contemporary art dealer Edith Gregor Halpert (Fig. 2). (1) Between 1950 and 1960, these two unusual, creative, and energetic women worked together, not only on additions to the collection but also on exhibition ideas, a sophisticated cataloging system, labels, and publicity. Halpert used her tremendous professional experience and skills to help Webb in ways hitherto not fully recognized.

A Russian Jewish immigrant, Halpert founded her famous Downtown Gallery at 113 West Thirteenth Street in 1926, (2) entering a field dominated by men. At the time, only a handful of New York City galleries bought and sold avant-garde American paintings, and none sold folk art. She went on to become a key player in creating and expanding the market for both. (3) Her skill as a businesswoman led her to offer payments on time for purchases in an era when other galleries scorned the practice. She was also unusually adept at public relations and marketing, holding sales before summer closings and specially priced Christmas exhibitions, which subsequently became ubiquitous in commercial art galleries.

Electra Webb, the daughter of the sugar magnate and art collector Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847-1907), was the only woman of her day to found a large art and outdoor history museum, opening the first eight buildings in July 1952. Webb's letters to Halpert reveal that the folk art galleries, which were among the first to open, were of supreme importance to her. She was particularly proud of her folk sculpture and wrote to Halpert, "I have strong tastes, and you have always been one who has said my personality shows in the museum." (4) Halpert regularly complimented Webb for her vision for the museum, and on one occasion, after Webb had rejected a piece from the Downtown Gallery and returned it to Halpert, the latter wrote:

I think it would be a great mistake for you to have in your collection anything that you do not respond to, no matter how fine it is. The whole quality of the museum is based on that, and I should feel simply terrible if I were, even indirectly, responsible for a tiny blemish. (5)

Webb was one of the earliest collectors of American folk art, making her first purchase in 1907 at the age of nineteen, when she bought a cigar-store figure that she had seen outside a tobacconist's shop in Stamford, Connecticut. Her mother, Louisine Elder Havemeyer (1855-1929), one of the great connoisseurs of French impressionist painting, was horrified when her daughter declared the figure a work of art.(6)

Halpert was introduced to American folk art through the legacy of the Brooklyn-born artist Hamilton Easter Field (1873-1922), who had been influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Henri Matisse (1869-1954) in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century.(7) Their passion for primitive art led Field to identify American trade signs, weather vanes, and other artifacts as art, and he began to buy examples before World War I. In addition, he and his protege Robert Laurent (1890-1970) revitalized the summer art colony in Ogunquit, Maine, attracting to it avant-garde painters and sculptors. Among the artists who regularly summered there were Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953), and Marguerite (1887-1968) and William Zorach (1887-1966). In 1926 and 1927, Halpert spent two pivotal summers at the colony with her artist-husband, Samuel (l884-1930).(8) The artists lived in cottages that Field had filled with folk art and country antiques, and Halpert reported that "the artists saw in these unconventional, direct, simplified, unselfconscious statements a kinship with their own aspirations."(9) William Zorach subsequently wrote in his autobiography that it was at Ogunquit that "Edith got the idea of picking up antiques and opening a little shop in New York."(10)

Halpert sold contemporary art in the first year at her gallery and then began to offer nineteenth-century folk art, which she sometimes billed as the "ancestors" of modern art. In fact, it was the considerable profits from the folk art sales at the Downtown Gallery that allowed Halpert to continue to show contemporary art, from which she made precariously little money.

One of Halpert's closest collaborators on folk art issues was Holger Cahill (1887-1960), who consulted with her in 1930 and 1931 when he was mounting, at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, the first folk art exhibitions to be held at an art museum. Cahill also helped Halpert collect folk art for one of her earliest clients, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr.; 1873-1948), whose collection forms the core of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia.(11) Halpert had an extraordinary eye for design and was able to hunt down the best artifacts for her gallery exhibitions.