” (2006) (© 2006 the Estate of Edith Schloss Burckhardt, photo by Jacob Burckhardt) Edith Schloss, “Famous people whose hand my little hand has shaken. Matthews’ when Marisol famously wore a mask to a 1961 panel talk at the Artists’ Club, she had agreed to go because Schloss wore a mask in camaraderie (although hers was a Halloween one, not the white Japanese mask that boosted Marisol’s legendary status). She was at the afterparty for Willem de Kooning’s first-ever solo show, in 1948, when he still had zero buyers or reviews she dressed up in matching pasteurized cow outfits with Meret Oppenheim for the 1951 Basel carnival and they won the costume contest she met Nikki de Saint Phalle when she still went by ‘Mrs. In reading her (loosely organized) recollections of living at 116 West 21st Street in Chelsea’s heyday, you discover that she also knew everyone and participated in big moments. Her work was varied and imaginative, ranging from boxed assemblages to brightly colored landscapes and abstractions.
Schloss is far from deserving to be a nameless extra, though. “In fact, and with no disrespect meant, in such histories Schloss might herself be one of those nameless extras.” Edith Schloss, “On the Ledge” (1976) (© 1976 the Estate of Edith Schloss Burckhardt, photo by Jacob Burckhardt) “Most histories of famous periods in art or of famous artists present a world where only a few actors play at the front of the stage and the rest of the cast are glancingly mentioned or are nameless,” writes artist and writer Mira Schor, in the introduction to Schloss’s posthumously released memoir about her life as a 20-something art student in Manhattan, and later years based in Rome. Before reading her recently published memoir, The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches 1942-2011, I admit I’d never heard of this painter and writer. In the many, many accounts of New York’s art scene of the 1940s and ’50s - that postwar generation that flung paint rebelliously and made setting up house in derelict industrial spaces look cool - Edith Schloss might get a passing mention.
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