Edith Schloss (July 20, 1919 - December 21, 2011) was a German-born American artist, art critic and author primarily known for abstract paintings and assemblages. She received art training first in her native Offenbach, Germany, and then, successively, in Florence, London, Boston, and New York. She spent the early part of her career working during the cold months in Manhattan and during the warm ones in coastal New England and then spent the last five decades of her life in Italy where she wintered in Rome and painted during the rest of the year in Liguria or Tuscany. While living in Italy she collaborated with the avant-garde composer Alvin Curran who later became her partner and lifelong friend.

Schloss's paintings were mostly small landscapes and still lifes in oil and watercolor. In 1947 a critic for Art News called her paintings "light-hearted abstractions" and in 1974 a critic for the New York Times described her watercolors as having a "general aura of poetic fantasy"^[1][2] She also made boxes small constructions with found-object contents. in a review published in Arts Magazine In 1974, a critic described her boxes as "genuinely artless, neither rarefied nor precious".^[3]

Schloss was born in Offenbach am Main, Germany, on July 20, 1919, the first-born child in a prosperous Jewish family.^[4][5] Her parents were Ludwig (b. 1887) and Martha Schloss (b. 1889).^[6] As a child she attended a local Volksschule and also received avant-garde art education in a class run by a man who taught collage but did not, as she later recalled, ever show his students how to draw or paint.^[5] When she was eleven years old her family sent her for language instruction to a boarding school for girls in Nancy, France.^[5] At about this time she also spent time as a student in a vocational school in Frankfurt where she later remembered seeing Van Gogh's portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet at the Städel art museum.^[7] By 1936, as the persecution of German Jews kept her from further study in Germany, her parents sent her to Italy where she worked as an au pair and studied art with her employer, Professoressa Teresita Baldi. Recalling this period she later wrote, "The Uffizi was full of the best fairy tales on earth ... what teenager is not moved by the cool tones and gentle stillness of the Primavera and The Birth of Venus?"^[5]

In 1938 she left Fascist Italy for England. Then aged 19, she no longer received parental support, had little money, and possessed no more than could fit into one small suitcase.^[5]: 307 Her ability to travel was restricted when Germany invalidated all Jewish passports in October of that year.^[8] Determining that she would not return to Germany, Schloss found that she could enter the United Kingdom as a refugee.^[5] Arriving in London, she was taken in by a small group of self-exiled German socialists and, in return for room and board, helped its members prepare and distribute their publications.^[5] Soon thereafter she found employment, again as an au pair, working for a family in Shrewsbury. At that time she took classes in drawing nudes at the Shrewsbury Technical College. She later moved back to London where she found work minding the children of the German-born illustrator, Walter Trier, and found time to attend art classes and visit museums.^[5] She chafed under restrictions the UK government imposed on her as a stateless woman who had been raised in an enemy nation, and in the summer of 1940 received support from the American Friends Service Committee to obtain one of the relatively few U.S. immigration visas available to Jews fleeing Germany.^[9][10] Departing from Liverpool on the RMS Antonia, she arrived in Quebec City on September 28 and crossed to the U.S. at St. Albans, Vermont, traveling from there to Boston where she found work as a waitress to support herself while taking classes at the Boston School of Practical Art.^[5][10] While living in Boston she met and began living with another German refugee, Heinz Langerhans. A revolutionary socialist whose views aligned with the group that had helped Schloss in London, Langerhans introduced her to other similarly aligned self-exiled Germans. In 1942 the pair moved to Manhattan, finding apartments successively in Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.^[5][11] In New York she studied at the New School for Social Research and attended lectures at Cooper Union while earning a living in a sequence of jobs in factories, newspapers, a photoengraving business, and again in a restaurant.^[7][12] She also enrolled at the Art Students League, because, as she later said, “anyone who wanted to be anyone” was studying there.^[7] At the League her teachers included Harry Sternberg, Will Barnet, Morris Kantor, and John Groth. "She recalled she learned most from Sternberg who once told her "Never wait for that famous inspiration. Just go on steadily every day and you’ll get there."^[7] On another he said, "Paint the sky red if you see it that way. Dare anything."^[13]

By 1944 Schloss and Langerhans were no longer living together.^[12] That year she moved into a loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan at 116 West 21st Street. The loft's previous tenant was a friend, the photographer Ellen Auerbach. Living nearby were artists Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Nell Blaine, and Jane Freilicher as were a filmmaker, Rudy Burckhardt and two poets, Edwin Denby and James Schuyler.^[14]: 311 Although he lived elsewhere, the painter Fairfield Porter had a studio on the same block.^[15]: 310 Porter, who shared socialist views with Langerhans, provided a bridge for Schloss between self-exiled Germans like Langerhans, and the bohemian art world in which Porter moved.^{[15]: 310 [16]} A few months after she met Porter he brought her to Willhem de Kooning's studio where she met him for the first time.^[17][12] Schloss later wrote about the encounter, saying the experience convinced her to change her approach to painting. In her words, she, "stopped looking out and tried to scoop shapes and colors from within myself."^[13]

Schloss completed her studies at the Art Students League in 1946 and somewhat tentatively settled into a career in art.^[5][18] In her memoir she said at this time she sometimes saw herself as a painter and other times as a writer.^[19] Despite this ambivalence she devoted much time and effort to her art. From the mid-1940s through the next six decades her work would appear in 40 solo exhibitions and some 50 group shows.^[20][21] In August 1946 she participated in her first exhibition, a large annual held by Gloucester Society of Artists in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Reviewing the exhibition, a critic for ARTnews cited her contributions as outstanding.^[22] In the fall of 1946 her work appeared in a show organized by an artists' collective called the Jane Street Group. In 1944 Schloss's friend Nell Blaine had become a founding member of the group and on her advice Schloss joined about a year later. Other members included Hyde Solomon, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Albert Kresch, and Judith Rothschild.^[18] In December, when she participated in an exhibition held at the New York gallery run by the art teacher and abstract artist Carl Ashby, a critic for Art Digest called a painting of hers "appealing both in its surface technique and subject matter".^[23] The following year she was given a duo exhibition with her friend Cicely Aikman at the Ashby Gallery.^[23] Writing in the New York Times, critic Howard Devree praised a semi-abstract painting called "West Twenty-first Street" but was less enthusiastic about her non-objective work. Overall he found her paintings to be "earnest and vigorous".^[24] Reviewing this show, an ARTnews critic described her paintings as "light-hearted abstractions".^[1] In 1951 Schloss participated in the watershed 9th Street Art Exhibition. The show included painting and sculpture by 72 artists, including many of her friends from The Club, a group of like-minded artists formed in 1949. Although Schloss and quite a few other participants were not themselves abstract expressionists, others, like the de Koonings, were forerunners of that art movement.^[7][25]

In the late 1940s and early 1950s she participated in duo and trio shows held by an artists' collective called the Pyramid Group.^[21] The artists in that group were mostly young and unknown and mostly associated with the Ashby Gallery.^[26] In addition to Schloss members included Cicely Aikman, Helen DeMott, Hyde Solomon, Paul Breslin, Al Blaustein, and Gordon Rothenberg.^[27][28] In 1949 an ARTnews critic drew attention to a painting of hers called "Between the World and the Weather" in a Pyramid Group show at the Riverside Museum, describing it as "a lyric abstraction".^[29] A 1955 duo exhibition that Schloss held with another Pyramid artist at the Hudson Guild drew favorable comments from a critic for Art Digest. Calling her work "simply and beautifully executed", the critic discussed elements of her style including its "feminine quality" and "delicate but firm handling".^[30]

In the early 1950s Schloss also began to participate in exhibitions at an artists' co-op called the Tanager Gallery.^[7] She continued her relationship with the Tanager until 1961. In that year a trio exhibition at Tanager with Lawrence Campbell and Gabriel Laderman drew an extensive review in ARTnews. Praising Schloss's "refreshing audacity", the ARTnews critic said the paintings had a "fidelity to form" and "an hypnotic visual allure", adding that they were "beautiful in a unique way".^[31] At this time she also began exhibiting with the American Abstract Artists group and continued to do so for the next few years.^[21] She made her first appearances in commercial galleries in 1956 when she participated in group shows at the Poindexter and the Kraushaar galleries.^[7] In 1959 she was given a solo exhibition at Constance Kane's Workshop Gallery where she showed small wooden boxes along with her paintings.^[32] This was probably her first solo in a commercial gallery. In reviewing it, a critic for Art Digest called her still lifes "tastefully decorative, sincere and pleasantly reminiscent of Chardin".^[33] The following year she mounted a solo exhibition at the Tanager Gallery and, with her friend Helen DeMott, organized a group exhibition called "American Still Life Painting Today" for a commercial gallery, the Peridot. Art Digest's critic said the two women had made excellent choices and Dore Ashton, in the New York Times, called Schloss's paintings "noteworthy".^[34][35] In 1961 Schloss participated in a major exhibition that was later understood to place assemblage as a significant artistic medium. The show contained 250 works by 150 artists dating from 1913. It attracted a good deal of critical attention including a review in the issue of Life magazine for October 20 of that year.^[36][37] A review by John Canaday of the New York Times used the terms "dazzler" and "spectacular" to describe it.^[38] One of the two box constructions that Schloss exhibited was pictured in the show's exhibition catalog.^[39]

In 1947 Schloss had married Rudy Burckhardt.^[18] In 1962 she separated from him and sailed to Italy with their twelve-year-old son Jacob. At first intending to travel for a few months, she eventually settled in Rome and retained it as her home base for the rest of her life.^[40] Most years, she would spend the warm months painting in Liguria or Tuscany and return to Rome during the colder ones.^[5] The Galleria Aleph in Rome gave her a solo exhibition of assemblages in 1964. A critic for a Rome paper called it the most entertaining of the city's current exhibitions.^[41] A year later the Galleria Scorpio, also in Rome, gave her a solo show of paintings in oil and watercolor.^[20] During the next 20 years she was given more than a dozen solo exhibitions in commercial galleries in Rome and other Italian cities.^[20][42] She also continued to send paintings and assemblages for exhibition in New York. These shows included solos at the Green Mountain Gallery (1970, 1972, 1974)^[43][44] and at the Ingber Gallery (1974, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1987, 1989).^[20] A review in Arts Magazine said her watercolors in the 1974 Ingber exhibition were "delightful in their spontaneity".^[3]

In 1966 she contributed watercolors to an event called a "sonic portrait of the city of Rome". This was the first of a number of collaborations with the avant-garde composer Alvin Curran who later became her partner and lifelong friend.^[18][12] She was given her last solo exhibition at the Ingber Gallery in 1989.^[45] She continued to be given solo exhibitions in Rome during the first decade of the 21st century.^[7] A 1997 show at the high school in Rome from which her son had graduated was probably the first solo exhibition following her death.^[20] In 2015 the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York staged what was said to be the most comprehensive display of her work to date.^[18] Three years later Meredith Ward Fine Art mounted a retrospective focusing on her work of the 1960s and 1970s. Reviewing this show, Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, "At this point in her life, Schloss painted with consummate ease and abundant charm, sketching her subjects and applying color as needed."^[46] In 2022 Alexanre Gallery mounted a show that included works by artists who were her friends along with her own works.^[41] In 2023 one writer showed that the response to Schloss's work was not uniformly positive, writing, "Schloss was a good but not great painter. Today her work is of interest primarily for how she melded the influences of the two artists she most admired, Porter and Willem de Kooning."^[47]

Schloss once told her son she could not decide which was more important to her, art or writing. As he recalled, she "could not decide whether she was a painter who writes or a writer who paints."^[5] Her first piece appeared in 1945. A report on artists who had fled Europe for New York and other American cities during World War II, it was published in German in a newspaper called Deutsche Blätter edited by German refugees in Santiago de Chile. In addition to news and opinions the paper contained literary and art reviews, fiction, and poetry.^[5][67] Although it was short-lived and given little notice after its demise, the New York German émigrés of its day recognized it for the contributions it received from authors such as Günther Anders, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Arthur Koestler, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig.^[68] After Schloss's marriage and during her son's infancy she published nothing but in 1954 she began writing for ARTnews. She did so because she had heard that a local school run by the Hudson Guild would only accept the children of working mothers.^[19] At the time her name first appeared on the masthead as an editorial associate, the others in that position included box artist, Lawrence Campbell; poet and art critic, Frank O'Hara; painter, Fairfield Porter, and author/critic, Parker Tyler. Her first reviews appeared in the issue of November 1954.^[69] Appearing in the "Reviews and Previews" section, they described one group exhibition, one duo exhibition, and six solos. One of the solo exhibitions was the first-ever given by the African-American artist, Joseph Delaney. After a brief biographic statement, the review focused on Delaney's subjects and technique, noting that he was "crazy about crowds and the New York scene" and citing his "preoccupation with detail" and the "undulating movement" evident in the paintings."^[69] In the magazine's next issue she reviewed an exhibition of works on paper by Oskar Kokoschka in which she said the watercolors, with their "deep glow of jewels embedded in heavy black lines" were "full of surprises" and the portraits with their "cobwebs of line" clearly indicated "underlying facial bone structure".^[70] Her first lengthy, featured review appeared in the issue for January 1958. Entitled "The Unfinished Cathedral and Antonio Gaudi", it described Gaudi's Sagrada Família in Barcelona and a recently-opened Gaudi exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.^[71] Schloss was proud of her job. "It was marvelous", she wrote, "Here I was, without connections, without much art historical background, without a clique pushing me, and, having been forced out of school at the age of sixteen, suddenly on the staff of the prestigious ARTnews."^[19] She stayed with the magazine until she relocated to Rome. From 1968 to 1988 she served as art critic for the Paris-based International Herald Tribune.^[18] She mainly wrote of art affairs in Italy for that paper, including, for example, a four-part series called "A Guide to the Art Galleries in Rome" published in the spring of 1970.^[72] She also reviewed exhibitions in New York. In one of these reviews, she might have been the first critic to notice the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The piece discussed an exhibition at MoMA PS1 in which his work appeared.^[73] A decade before writing her profile of MEV in the Village Voice, she had written an article on her friend Nell Blaine for that paper.^[74] She also wrote for the monthly English-language magazine, Wanted in Rome. A few months after Schloss's death Wanted in Rome published a profile she had written of Cy Twombly, calling him "the most lyrical painter of our time".^[75]

In addition to her writings on Italian and American art and music, Schloss wrote articles on cultural topics of current interest. In the early 1970s, she wrote two articles about abortion in Italy. The first, called "One Woman/All Women: Abortion in Italy", appeared in Ms. magazine in 1973 and the second, called "Italian Women Speak Up for Abortion" appeared in Feminist Revolution: Redstockings, published by the radical feminist organization of that name in 1975.^[76][77] She also self-published books, including Seven Dog Walks In Rome Or More (1974) and Songs of la Serra (poems and drawings, 1982).^[7] Her best-known book was the posthumously-published memoir The Loft Generation.^[5] Discussing her art writings in this book, she wrote: "Art writing is like embroidery, knitting, or another painstaking craft. Pushing words around gives you the satisfaction of a craft well done. You get your wits together to write as intelligently and amusingly as you are able to. Its greatest reward is this: while your art may languish away in the studio, your art writing bursts into the daylight and functions in public. Immediately in print, it serves people, neatly fits into everyday activity. At its best it is a signpost to the viewer, to show her or him how to appreciate things anew, to stir up fresh perception."^[19]

In the late 1970s, Schloss began teaching art classes in the Roman satellite campuses of several American universities including the Tyler School of Art and Architecture (Temple University, Philadelphia), Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Minnesota. She also gave lectures at Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna and the American Academy in Rome and on Italian radio and television programs.^[7]

When she arrived in London as a stateless and penniless refugee, Schloss immediately fell in with a small and tight-knit group of militant socialists.^[5] In her memoir and other writings she did not say how she first came in contact with the group's members. Because some of them were in Frankfurt during the time she studied at a technical school there, it is possible, if not probable, that she met them then.^[7][11] The group was called the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund and was referred to as ISK. In English-speaking countries it became known as the International Socialist League of Struggle.^[78] Its objectives were the overthrow of the Nazi regime to be replaced by a Leninist, but anti-Stalinist, political cadre that was to be highly disciplined and directed by an elite core of leaders.^[78] The group's discipline and small size enabled it to escape Nazi purges in the early 1930s and, although it achieved none of its objectives, its relative insignificance allowed it to pull off a stunt that temporarily embarrassed the regime. The event, called the Autobahn-Aktion, was staged during opening ceremonies for the first finished portion of the Reichsautobahn in 1935. The regime detected the Aktion beforehand. Nazis placed flags over slogans that ISK members put on bridges and used sand to cover slogans painted on the roadway. However, they failed to notice some roadway slogans that had been painted in a light-sensitive paint that became apparent only after the sun rose on the day of the ceremony or to dected a trash heap that had been seeded and fertilized causing a slogan to appear as the grass grew.^[79] Schloss was probably in Frankfurt at the time of the action. She admitted to having a rebellious nature and a hatred of Nazism but available records do not indicate how she responded to news of this event or say whether she had contact with members of the ISK at that time.^[7] The group that fed and housed her in London was an offshoot of ISK called the Militant Socialist International, or MSI.^[78]

Heinz Langerhans, with whom Schloss lived in Boston and New York during the early 1940s, was a member of ISK. While studying in Germany, Langerhans had become acquainted with other German émigrés then living in New York. Two of his German friends, Paul Mattick and his wife Ilse, lived on the block on 21st Street in which, in 1944, Schloss would rent her loft.^[14]: 310 It was via Ilse's friendship with Fairfield Porter that Schloss's New York acquaintanceship was enlarged to include the artists who lived and worked or, like Porter, frequently visited the block.^[14]: 109 During this period Schloss's future husband, Rudy Burckhardt, a photographer, also came to live on the 21st street block and became friends with another of the German socialist émigrés, Ellen Auerbach, who was also a professional photographer. The interconnection between the German émigré socialists and the artists, both émigré and American-born, was described by Gary Roth in Marxism in a Lost Century (Koninklijke Brill, Leiden, 2005). He wrote that Fairfield Porter's studio was down the block from the Matticks' apartment. Porter had taken over the studio from Walter Auerbach after he and Ellen had separated. Willem de Kooning lived a few doors away. Nell Blaine lived across the street. Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt lived together in an apartment "that could be reached across the rooftops". Others in the neighborhood included the poet James Schuyler and artist Jane Freilicher.^{[14]: 220–221} In Loft Generation Schloss acknowledged this intersection in writing about her first sighting of a Willem de Kooning painting. The farmhouse where she saw the painting was occupied by a German émigré, Fritz Henssler, who worked closely with Mattick, Auerbach, and Langerhans.^{[14]: 214 [17]}

In the early 1930s Auerbach and Langerhans had helped Henssler edit Proletarier ("Proletarian") magazine.^[14]: 109 Like the other two Henssler entered the U.S. as a political refugee. Before the United States entered World War II, they and the other Germans with whom they associated made little progress in obtaining popular support for their socialist campaign against both capitalism and totalitarianism. After the Americans entered the war, the group's anti-Nazi stand was pretty much universal in the United States. Its opposition to capitalism was much less popular than it had been during the years of the Great Depression and its opposition to Stalinism failed to gain traction within its target audience of industrial workers.^[14]: 179 The group, as one writer put it, experienced dwindling confidence in its effectiveness as a proponent of revolutionary socialism.^[15]: 149 As the war came to a close, it became clear that Schloss and her friends among the abstract expressionists had abandoned the hope that their political beliefs might benefit society. Ilse Mattick later wrote: "There was nothing going on. The [German émigré] group hadn't broken up, exactly—we were still all friends, but there was nothing going on politically."^[15]: 149

Schloss was born in Offenbach, Germany, on July 20, 1919.^[4] Her birth name was Edith Lina Schloss.^[9] Her father, Ludwig Wilhelm Schloss (1884-1943), was a successful leather goods dealer specializing in women's handbags.^[7][80] Little is known of her mother save her given name and dates, Martha Goldschmidt Schloss (1889–1994). Schloss had a younger brother named Fritz (born 1922, called Fred after emigration to the U.S.).^[7] Her father sent her abroad during her early teens because he believed language proficiency was important and because Nazi persecution increasingly restricted the education available to Jews.^[7]: 306 In November 1938 he telephoned Schloss in London to say the family had emerged relatively unscathed by the Kristallnacht pogrom and had finally decided they could no longer remain in Germany. With help from her acquaintances and British contacts of her father's, she was able to obtain letters of invitation for each of the three family members and by August 1939 each of them had arrived and been permitted to remain as stateless refugees and, technically, enemy aliens.^[5][81] Under British law Ludwig did not have the same freedom of movement or ability to obtain employment as did his wife, daughter, and son.^[9] He died in an internment camp in Shrewsbury in 1943.^[82] Others among Schloss's relatives, including her father's mother, remained in Germany and did not survive the war.^[83] In 1940 Schloss traveled alone to Quebec on a steamship in convoy and crossed into the U.S. in Vermont as a stateless refugee having named a cousin living in New York as her sponsor.^[10] After she had settled in Manhattan, she helped her mother and brother to join her. She applied for U.S. citizenship in 1941 and was granted it in the summer of 1946.^[7] A few months later she and Burckhardt married. He and Edwin Denby were lovers at the time. Schloss was unconcerned about their attachment to each other and, like some of her friends, was unimpressed by the social significance of marriage.^[83] She later wrote, almost as an aside in connection with her move to the loft on 21st Street, "Eventually he came to live with me in Pit's loft, where we ended up getting married, raising a child, and spending eighteen years together." Jacob Burckhardt, their son and only child, was born in 1949. Schloss took primary responsibility for his care. The loft where they lived when he was born had no bathtub. The shower stall, which Willem de Kooning had constructed when Ellen Auerbach lived there, was located near the front door and the area used as a kitchen was at the back. Jacob's crib was in the part of the loft Schloss used for a studio.^[17]

In the late 1950s, the Schloss's marriage fell apart. As she put it, she and Rudy "had a lot of trouble with each other".^[48] They separated in 1961 and three years later their divorce was formalized and Italy became her home for the rest of her life.^[5] Italian culture, and the Italian subjects of her paintings, became the main focus of her life.^[5]

Schloss died in her home in Rome on December 21, 2011, and was subsequently buried in the Campo Cestio Cemetery which is also known as the Protestant, Non-Catholic or English Cemetery a cemetery in that city.^[4] Her death occurred the day before the opening of a joint presentation of her paintings and music by Alvin Curran.^[7]

She was described variously by people who knew her as having a "vivacity of temperament, both artistic and intellectual,^[4] as a "tough, talented, ambitious, and whip-smart survivor,"^[53] and as a person both "vital and unaffected", having "a big personality in a diminutive frame" and an "impish smile".^[40]