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

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Henry Joyce

Dear Edith,

From the enclosed formal letter, you will see that we elected you a member of our Board of Trustees. This was done, not with the idea of giving you more to do for the Shelburne Museum, but in recognition of the work that you have done in the past years. It seems the only way that I can show you how deeply I appreciate all your interest, wonderful advice and great help. (47)

(1.) There are sixty letters from Edith Gregor Halpert to Electra Havemeyer Webb and fifty-seven from Webb to Halpert in the Shelburne Museum archives (series III, museum correspondence, box 9). All the letters quoted in this article are in the same box.

(2.) The shop was originally called Our Gallery, but the name was changed in 1927. The row house still stands, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues; its basement now houses a restaurant.

(3.) For an illuminating biography of Halpert and her career up to about 1940, see Diane Tepfer, "Edith Gregor Halpert and the Downtown Gallery Downtown: 1926-1940: A Study in American Art Patronage" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1989).

(4.) Webb to Halpert, July 16, 1953.

(5.) Halpert to Webb, June 4, 1953.

(6.) Today there are forty cigar-store figures in the museum's collection, most of them acquired by Webb.

(7.) In 1925, Halpert herself lived and worked briefly in Paris, where she knew avant-garde artists and writers, including Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and her circle.

(8.) Halpert credits Field's pioneering interest in folk art in an unpublished article intended for The Magazine ANTIQUES (Downtown Gallery records, 1824-1974, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.).

(9.) Ibid.

(10.) William Zorach, Art Is My Life: The Autobiography of William Zorach (World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1967), p. 88.

(11.) Rockefeller also bought modernist art from Halpert, which she gave to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, of which she was a founding trustee.

(12.) Webb paid ninety dollars for the Indian bust, according to Halpert's bill, dated March 21, 1941 (object files, Shelburne Museum).

(13.) TOTE stands for Totem of the Eagle, a phrase used in the nineteenth century by a secret fraternal organization called the Improved Order of Red Men, which adopted American Indian names and expressions and which presumably commissioned the weather vane.

(14.) Stuart Davis, "The Cube Root (1943)," An News, February 1943; reprinted in Stuart Davis, Major Late Paintings (Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York, 2002), p. 11.

(15.) Halpert's bills, dated March 21 and July 15, 1941, respectively, record that she charged Webb one hundred dollars each for Revolutionary Soldier and Nine Pins (museum object files). For more about the Index of American Design, see Virginia Tuttle Clayton, "The Index of American Design: Picturing a national identity," The Magazine Antiques, vol. 162. no. 6 (December 2002), pp. 74-83. Revolutionary Soldier and Nine Pins and the watercolors of them made for the Index are all on view in the exhibition Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., until March 2.