Samuel Halpert | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Samuel Halpert (1884-1930)

Samuel Halpert is considered an American pioneer of Post-Impressionism. Exposed to the paintings and theories of Paul Cézanne and the Fauves through his many years residence in Paris, Halpert created a style of intense color and simplified form, while adhering to realism.

Samuel Halpert was born in 1884 in Bialystock, Russia (present day Poland) and immigrated to America with his parents when he was five years old. He was one of eight children, and was reared along with his siblings in a lower East Side tenement in New York City.

Halpert first studied at the Educational Alliance, where he met the sculptor Jacob Epstein and the art critic Henry McBride. He trained at the National Academy of Design in New York under J. Carroll Beckwith and in 1902 he traveled to Paris where he enrolled in classes at the École des Beaux-Arts. He later studied at the Académie Julian but left there in 1904. He returned to New York in 1905 and was back in Paris again in 1906.

In Paris, Halpert associated with other Americans, including Patrick Henry Bruce and Max Weber as well as the European painters Robert and Sonya Delaunay, Fernand Leger, Jean Metzinger, Henri Matisse, and Henri Rousseau. Inspired by the wild Fauve displays he encountered at the Salon exhibitions in Paris, Halpert began to work in a Fauve-related style of painting around 1909. His compositions in this vein were well balanced, economically constructed and infused with a new appreciation for dazzling color. They were rooted in nature, rather than the products of Halpert’s imagination.

Halpert typically depicted landscape and cityscape subjects that were emblematic of a certain locale. In New York he painted Bryant Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Washington Square. In Paris he celebrated views of the Seine running through the center of the “City of Lights.” He immortalized the Tuileries in Paris in his painting Quai des Tuileries (Millennium Partners Collection).

Halpert and Abel Warshawsky, a painter from Cleveland who was also a Julian student, left Paris in April 1909 for a three-month tour of Italy. By July they were back in France and found affordable lodging in the Normandy village of Vernon just across the river Seine from Giverny. They remained at Vernon through the fall and were eventually joined by American painters Leon Kroll and Ivan Olinsky. Although he was so close to the colony of American Impressionists at Giverny, by the summer of 1909 Halpert’s interest had been claimed by the simplified shapes, flattened space, and prismatic colors of the Modernist painters Henri Matisse and Albert Marquet.

Halpert returned to New York in 1911 and renewed previously established relationships with Alfred Stieglitz and Charles Daniel, visionary art dealers who were promoting Modernist works by such men as John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Dove, and Charles Demuth. Inspired by the American subjects that these artists were engaged with at the time, Halpert turned his attention from European motifs, finding material for his brush in the buildings and traffic of New York City and the landscape around Lake George in upstate New York. He participated in the Armory show of 1913, lending two of his own paintings and acting as agent for his Paris friends, the Frenchman Robert Delaunay and the American Patrick Henry Bruce. In the spring and summer of 1913 he shared a cottage with Man Ray in Ridgefield, New Jersey, about twenty miles outside New York.

Halpert and Edith Fein were married in 1918. A professional woman with a background in business, Edith Halpert opened a gallery in 1926, which she called Our Gallery. This evolved into the enormously successful Downtown Gallery, in which she creatively combined offerings of American Modernism with American folk art. Edith Halpert represented many of the artists who had formerly been with Alfred Stieglitz or Charles Daniel, including her husband. Although the Halperts’ marriage ended in divorce, Edith remained a staunch admirer and supporter of Samuel Halpert’s work. She was in the process of arranging a Halpert retrospective for the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo when Halpert’s untimely death occurred on April 5, 1930. The retrospective thus went up as a memorial exhibition in 1931.