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Edith Gregor Halpert (born Edith Gregoryevna Fivoosiovitch (Fein)) (1900-1970) was a pioneering New York City dealer of Modern art. Halpert brought recognition and market success to many avant-garde American artists over her forty-year career from 1926 through the 1960s. Her establishment, The Downtown Gallery, one of the first in Greenwich Village, introduced or showcased such modern art luminaries as Stuart Davis, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Jacob Lawrence, Charles Sheeler, David Fredenthal, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, Marguerite and William Zorach, and many others. She soon started to incorporate American Folk Art within the scope of the gallery, advising most notably Abby Aldrich Rockefeller for her collection in Colonial Williamsburg. Alongside her interest in folk art was a side interest in African and Oceanic Art, collected primarily in a short period in the 1950's through the dealers Mathias Komor in New York and Boris Mirski in Boston. A great American success story, Halpert arrived in the United States as a penniless Russian Jewish immigrant, transformed the landscape of Modern art, and died, a wealthy woman, at age 70 (see Lindsay Pollack, The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert And the Making of the Modern Art Market, New York, 2006).
Bamana door locks are among the most remarkable of all African art. Sculpted of wood in a rich variety of forms, they depict mythological and historical figures, social events, and representational figures-crocodiles, lizards, tortoises, owls, bats, butterflies, humans - the rich an dvaried surface of this Halpert door lock attests to decades of use within the culturs. See Pascal James Imperato, Legends, sorcerers, and enchanted lizards: Door Locks of the Bamana of Mali, 2001, for detailed discussion.
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