Women Breaking Through Edith Schloss (1919-2011)

Edith Schloss, Big Cloud, 1980-83, oil on canvas, 27 1/2 x 22 5/8 inches

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we are sharing breakthrough moments of some of the gallery's women artists.

When Edith Schloss arrived in Rome in 1962 with her young son Jacob, she only planned on staying for three months. Although Schloss was deeply embedded in the Chelsea-New York art world as a successful artist and critic, she had recently separated from her husband, the filmmaker Rudy Burkhardt, and was looking for change. Schloss’s brief sojourn in Rome turned into a life-long residence. In Italy, she befriended other Americans, including artists Peter Rockwell and Cy Twombly, and still life painter Giorgio Morandi who became one of her mentors. Morandi’s impact on Schloss’s work is evident in her contemplative still lifes of this period, into which she injects an unabashed playfulness. Over three decades Schloss continued to paint inventive still lifes as she travelled throughout Italy, with locales like La Spezia becoming a regular subject in her work. From 1964 to the early 1980s, she spent summers in Lerici, which overlooks the Gulf of La Spezia and the island of Tino, and was most likely the inspiration for her painting Big Cloud.

Schloss’s permanent move to Italy allowed her to establish herself independently from the Chelsea set and foster an international reputation. In addition to exhibiting widely throughout the last decades of the 20th century in Italy, the United States, and her native Germany, she collaborated with musicians, theaters, and poets, and even wrote and illustrated several children’s books and a book of her own poetry. Schloss wrote of her work, “What I 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.”

Edith Schloss's work is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hessisches Landesmuseum, Wiesbaden, Germany; Offenbacher Stadtmuseum, Offenbach, Germany; The Keats-Shelley House, Rome; and Centro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, La Spezia, Italy. To view more of Schloss's work available through the gallery, please visit our website.