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.