Mme. Don Ton

For a little girl from Odessa, Edith Gregor Halpert, now 64, has done pretty well for herself. Monet once kissed her on the cheek. The great Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard whispered the secrets of his success in her ear. John D.

Rockefeller Jr. objected to the funny-looking American folk art that she sold his wife. Eventually it helped to furnish Williamsburg.

Spirited as a suffragette, Edith Halpert helped make U.S. art dealing truly coed. The Russians recall her, when she was curator of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, as the woman who told off President Eisenhower when he implied criticism of the show's modern look. The French respect her as Mme. Don Ton, for her gallery's name, Downtown, although it has been located in mid-Manhattan since 1940.

Thirteenth Street Promotion. Always precocious, Edith was 14 when she enrolled in Manhattan's National Academy of Design, began haunting Alfred Stieglitz' Intimate Gallery. On a trip to Paris, with her late husband, painter Samuel Halpert, she concluded that European artists had more money and respect than U.S. ones. A year later in 1926 she founded a gallery on 13th Street to help promote contemporary U.S. art.

Mrs. Halpert married living painting with her second great love--American folk art--to show "a kinship and a source" for contemporary art. She came back from cash-and-carry raids into the countryside with her Hupmobile limousine loaded down with Americana. Then she showed it alongside her Yasuo Kuni-yoshis, Elie Nadelmans and Marsden Hartleys. The folk art sold itself and helped sell modern work. In fact, Mrs. Halpert's first sale was pure Americana curio--a chalk mantel stop, used to hold down lace mantel coverings.

Magnificent Mixture. Now, 38 years later, widowed and childless, she plans to pass on her modern collection of 150 lovingly gathered paintings and sculptures (valued at $500,000) to the Corcoran Gallery--already well stocked in 19th century U.S. artists and The Eight--in Washington, D.C.

"We're one of the few countries that do not have a gallery of national art in their capital," says Mrs. Halpert. Her remedy is a magnificent mixture (see color pages) of Marin, Sheeler, Davis, Demuth, Jack Levine, Ben Shahn, William Zorach, Max Weber--all at one time shown in her gallery --and dozens more. Yet she refuses to let the Corcoran label her bequest as the Halpert Collection, because she hopes to persuade others to give works. "There are lots of gaps," says she. "You see, I've only bought the things I've loved." Her love has hardly gone astray.

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