Edith Schloss at Independent 20th Century with Alexandre Gallery
Independent 20th Century
Cipriani South Street
10 South Street
New York, NY 10004
September 7-10, 2023
Alexandre Gallery will pair paintings and works on paper by American artists Loren MacIver (1909-98) and Edith Schloss (1919-2011). Both elevated quotidian subjects: MacIver through poetic renderings of moments and objects collected over a lifetime of travel and contemplation, and Schloss in whimsical views and still-lifes that celebrate the ease and joy of summer on the Mediterranean coast. MacIver’s Shack (1934) was notably the first painting by a woman represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1935. Schloss left the New York School in 1962 to settle in Rome, becoming a prolific art critic as well as a painter; her posthumous memoir was published to acclaim in 2021.
Included among a minority of women artists in the Abstract Expressionism movement and in the New York School of the 1950s and 60s, Edith Schloss was a bold—and at times brash— presence in the art world. 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 including artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov, and Larry Rivers; composer John Cage; and poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and John Schuyler. Schloss decided to leave New York with her young son following the dissolution of her marriage to photographer Rudy Burkhardt, and settled in Rome in 1962. She would remain there for the rest of her life, summering in the coastal town of La Spezia in the northwest region of Liguria. In Italy, Schloss cemented her role as 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 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, deemed a “glowing jewel of a book.” Schloss’s work, which spans painting, assemblage, collage, watercolor, and drawing, embraces the intimate, the primitive, and the profound. Her playful still life paintings are often set in the foreground against views out of open windows onto the Mediterranean Sea, celebrating everyday wonders with a delight in pure color and child- like curiosity—yet resolute in representational form.
Schloss’s work, which spans painting, assemblage, collage, watercolor, and drawing, embraces the intimate, the primitive, and the profound. Her playful still life paintings are often set in the foreground against views out of open windows onto the Mediterranean Sea, celebrating everyday wonders with a delight in pure color and child- like curiosity—yet resolute in representational form. The understated abstraction of the still lifes and visions of the sea in Rignalla (1967), Open Window (1974), and Melograno (1979), speak to her attention to the individual spirit of each object, each section of the canvas. As Schloss said, “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.”