Art: Lady Raider

The little lady with the bright grey eyes had peculiar tastes and peculiar ways. She would roam through back-country towns in her black Hupmobile, stopping at every antique shop and every likely-looking old house to ask permission to poke about a spell. She cared not a jot for antique furniture; what she wanted were old portrait paintings, still-lifes on velvet, birth certificates with watercolor designs around the edges, rusty weathervanes and peeling figureheads.

Always paying cash for what she found, and never leaving a forwarding address, Edith Gregor Halpert quietly amassed the biggest collection of folk art in the U.S. She started combing New England, Pennsylvania and upper New York State in 1929, and found over 1,000 pieces in three years—including the best there were.

Collecting customers was harder, until Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought a comprehensive cross-section for Williamsburg, Va. Nowadays museum directors come from Wichita and even Hawaii to buy Edith Halpert’s wares, at markups ranging from 100 to 1.000%. They do their choosing behind closed doors in her Downtown Gallery (in midtown Manhattan), which specializes in such U.S. contemporaries as Charles Sheeler, Ben Shahn and Jack Levine, while turning its real profits from folk art.

Last week, Collector Halpert had cleared her gallery’s top floor of moderns, to give Manhattanites a rare peek at her old stuff. On exhibition were 27 prize paintings and sculptures, mostly dating from the 19th Century (and from the early Hupmobile raids). Among the standouts: a sad-eyed Woman with Yellow Shawl from Massachusetts, a tapestry-like little Apollo and Marsyas by Edward Hicks, and a Hogarthian Farmhouse Gossip (see cut), signed T. G. Knight, which she had found in Pennsylvania.

Edith Halpert shies at selling her best finds to private collectors, lovingly hides them away in the old Connecticut farmhouse where she spends her summers. “These things are not cute a bit,” she says proudly, “and they’re not quaint either. They’re art. The one quality they all share is design, you see, and that’s what contemporary artists emphasize too. Our modern painters have learned a lot from these folk artists. . . .”