LISTSERV 16.5 - ARLIS-L Archives

Avant-garde composer and musician Alvin Curran has written about his meeting with artist, writer, and critic Edith Schloss Burckhardt during his first years in Rome: "In that same settling-in period I met Edith Schloss, an Offenbach-born New York painter just divorced from photographer-painter Rudy Burckhardt. She arrived on a cloud of combustible materials which included the entire New York Abstract Expressionist movement, the Cedar Bar, Art News, MOMA, the Art Students League and Balanchine Stravinsky the Carters Edwin Denby de Kooning Twombly Feldman Cage Brown Rothko Cunningham Pollack her beloved Morandi and of course 'Piero' (della Francesca)..."

The Edith Schloss Burckhardt Archive offers an extraordinary opportunity for research into multiple areas of scholarship, especially unique insight into the lives and experiences of women in the art world, an American artist's expat life in Rome from the 1960s-2010s, the New York School of painters and poets, and a particularly rich and far-reaching, vein of the avant-garde and experimental music world, to name a few.

Correspondence with many fellow artists, friends and writers, including John Ashbery, Ellen and Walter Auberbach, Nell Blaine, Jacob Burckhardt, Italo Calvino, Lawrence Campbell (2 folders), Helen Jones Carter (7 folders), Clark Coolidge, Joseph Cornell (plus ephemera), Alvin Curran (12 folders, plus photographs and ephemera), Lucien Day, Elaine de Kooning, Helen DeMott (9 folders), Edwin Denby (2 folders), Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes (6 folders), Hermine Ford (3 folders), Patience Gray (5 folders), Barbara Guest, Ernst Hacker (2 folders), John Heliker (4 folders), Thomas Hess, Trumbull Higgins, Yvonne Jacquette (7 folders), Nathan Kernan, Denise Levertov, Phillip Lopate, Pat Mainardi (2 folders), Bernadette Mayer, Georgio Morandi, Norman Mommens, Charles North, Meret Oppenheim (also photographs and ephemera), Philip and Dorothy Pearlstein, Simon Pettet, Frederic Rzewski, Aram Saroyan (3 folders), Carolee Schneemann, James Schuyler, Jack Tworkov, Lucia Vernarelli (7 folders), and Hazel Hawthorne Werner.

Edith Schloss was born in Offenbach, Germany. She was sent to France and England to learn languages and, in 1936, attended a private school in Florence where she first fell in love with Italy. Edith eventually ended up in England working as an au pair while going to night school. During the Blitz she left England in a convoy that landed in New York City.

In New York Edith attended lectures and dance performances at Cooper Union and studied painting and printmaking at the Art Students League. She also studied art history, music and poetry at the New School for Social Research.

Her friend, Heinz Langerhans, German sociologist and follower of Marxist theoretician Karl Korsch, introduced her to Anne and Fairfield Porter. In 1944, Porter introduced Edith to Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and soon after she moved into a West 21st Street Chelsea loft that de Kooning had painted for Walter and Ellen "Pit" Auberbach.

Edith very quickly became a part of the de Kooning/Denby Chelsea scene that included photographer/filmmaker/painter Rudy Burckhardt and the Jane Street Group around Nell Blaine. In 1947, she and Burckhardt married. Edith was "known for knowing everyone who counted in Manhattan's legendary postwar art scene," (New York Sun, 2008) and she, Burckhardt and Denby were vital components of the New York School and the loft scene of that era.

In 1962, Edith and Rudy Burckhardt separated, at which point Edith and her young son Jacob moved to Rome. In Italy she painted and supported herself with her writing; she was the Italian art editor for the International Herald Tribune for nearly 20 years and wrote for Wanted in Rome. During this time, Edith became friends with artists Cy Twombly (with whom she had an exhibition), Giulio Turcato, Paul Klerr and Peter Rockwell. She was also a longtime partner and lifelong friend of composer/performer/teacher Alvin Curran, with whom she often collaborated.