MP: Let's talk about the Philadelphia artists that you did show. At some point you obviously shifted over and did start to show the work of Philadelphia artists. Is there some sort of watershed year when that happened or was it just something you drifted into?

EG: No, I didn't drift into it all. In 1971 I realized that I couldn't keep on showing New York artists because there was no way to build up the reputation and to sustain it since I was doing this on a show by show basis. Whereas, I discovered that local artists had local followings and I met the artists because they came to the gallery and they would invite me out to see their work. I also realized that, my goodness, just because they lived in Philadelphia didn't mean that they didn't have talent. What it did mean was that they didn't have the reputation and they were not asking the prices that New York artists were. So I decided that I would try showing some of the artists whom I liked and again, it took a while by the time I met them; say their work; set up a show. It was probably 1972 before I really showed Philadelphians. 

MP: Many of the galleries with the longest history in Philadelphia have been run by women.

EG: Yes. Well, women are willing to take less than men in any field, I think. You know, they're willing to settle for being an anesthesiologist even though they may have a gift for surgery because people will tell them that they're not going to make a good surgeon or they can't have a family if they're going to be a surgeon, that kind of thing. So women will settle for a little less and I think women who like the art field will say, well, they can't make a lot of money, but...

MP: Do you feel that there's been any sort of change that makes the climate more hospitable for women artists?

EG: Well, I think there's probably less active prejudice against showing a woman. I mean it would never occur to me not to show someone because it was a woman. On the other hand, there are far too many women painting today so that it's difficult... Women are sometimes too negative about themselves. I mean they come in and practically say, "You wouldn't want to handle this, would you?" It's very easy to say, "No, as a matter of fact I wouldn't." [laughs] They practically set it up for you. 

Most shows were scheduled one or two years out (I remember getting a call from an artist right after Estelle died, and her major concern was about her show that was scheduled six months from then). I also started to rely on my assistants to identify promising younger artists. For many years, in August, I would allow my assistant director to curate a show with artists of their choosing. Throughout the year, we would hang small exhibits, two-person shows, and group exhibits to try emerging artists. That is how Aubrey Levinthal started out. Now she’s a big star in New York. 

EJ: In Estelle's 1989 interview with Marina Pacini, she states, "Most of us are not in a position to spend a hundred thousand dollars or more on a work of art, no matter how much we love it or appreciate it..." Was the middle-class market key to sustaining Gross McCleaf's longevity?

SE: Yes, I would say so. Estelle never promoted buying art as an investment. That is not to say that some work we sold didn’t appreciate in value. But investment was not the chief motive. The artists who showed with GMG were professionals, most of them were on faculties of prestigious art schools. They made quality work, but many times clients bought paintings for the wrong reasons: because it matched the couch or was the right size. It was only after a while that the owner realized that the painting was visually valuable to them long after the couch had worn out.

end up being the biggest collector of one’s own work.” I think at the top tier of art, where the big dollars were being made and spent, there was still a lot of bias against women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ artists. They were marginalized. But at GMG, at least women were well-represented, and sales of their work constituted an important part of our revenue. In 1989, I was juggling having a career and raising a family. I was lucky to have a husband who had a good job and was supportive of me and to have Estelle who valued me and was flexible enough so that family needs could be met. Some of my friends in other fields such as law, medicine, the financial world, and even academia were not so lucky. I felt very optimistic about the trajectory of feminism.

Excerpt: Martha Armstrong with Elizabeth Johnson, Fall 2023, edited by Matthew Crain

Elizabeth Johnson: Your bio on your website says that you started showing at Gross McCleaf Gallery in 1974. You've shown with the gallery almost 50 years! How did you connect with Estelle Gross? What stories can you share that illustrate her unique personality and her way of running a business and handling clients and artists? If it is typical for an artist to leave a gallery after a decade or two, what explains the longevity of your bond with GMG?

Martha Armstrong: I knew three galleries in Philadelphia: Makler, which was closing; Marian Locks; and Gross McCleaf. I showed work to Estelle, and she took it. She gave me a show in 1974. She said this was a marriage of convenience, and if my work sold, I would stay. I changed and changed as a painter. I had a lot of ideas and had to pursue them. I brought in a lot of huge collage abstract images, and at one point she said, “But Martha, you are a Fairfield Porter painter!" I liked Fairfield Porter but felt he was in the past. In general, Estelle didn't comment negatively about new ideas I presented to her. She was supportive and a very good businesswoman. I was always paid promptly. Her shows were well-managed, well-advertised, and I was almost always reviewed. Estelle brought European liberalism and Jewish knowledge and intelligence to the art world and her art business. And courtesy! And grace!  

Sharon Ewing, who had graduated from Wellesley College in art history ten years after I graduated from Smith, was working for her. How lucky I was. I never thought of leaving. I just wanted a place to show my work and to keep on painting and learning. Because I changed so much every time I took in new work, I thought I’d be asked to leave. It didn’t happen. 

Impressionists. Standing in a large room of Impressionist paintings at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, she looked fundamentally different. She was creating a space, opening a space. Her male contemporaries were filling up a space. She was expressing herself. There was a statement of different intentions.

Philadelphia is a conservative city. The art scene has been dominated by Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Arthur Carles was more New York than Philadelphia. Alfred Barnes tried to bring Modernist painting to Philadelphia and was so persecuted by the public, he closed his collection. Meanwhile, New York City’s MoMA was filled with the latest works of European avant-garde artists. The Guggenheim was another cutting-edge modern collection. 

Are things different today? We are going through a highly misogynistic time. It is destructive of women, especially poor women. It is as if we should save every maple seed, make it grow, and then punish women for not tending to all these maple trees. What are we thinking? What does it say?

Longhauser ran the art galleries at Moore College; the late Eleni Cocordas was the director of exhibitions at PCA; Judith Stein the curator at PAFA organized its Peale House Gallery exhibitions and later its Morris Gallery exhibitions; the late Marion “Kippy” Stroud ran the Fabric Workshop. The artist Edith Emerson still ran Woodmere when I was in school. The newspaper critics and magazine art writers were mostly women: Nessa Forman (The Bulletin), Dorothy Grafly, Victoria Donohoe (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Joan Horvath (Philadelphia Arts Exchange), Ann Jarmusch (ARTnews), and the late Doris Brandes (Art Matters). Anne Fabbri Butera was a critic and curator. And, of course, there was Anne d’Harnoncourt at PMA.

EJ: You started at PAFA, in 1974, during artists: women, the first Focus show at GMG. The participating artists were Lorraine Alexander, Peggie Bach, Kaye Freeman, Kiisel Greenwood, Maria Hart, Jeanette Johnson, Edith Kaplan, Fran Lachman, Enid Mark, Nancy McIntyre, Jane Piper, and Doris Staffel. Did you become friends with any of them?

BS: I didn’t become a full-time PAFA student until the fall of 1974. But in 1970, I began attending Friends Select School, which is two blocks west of PAFA. I was a terrible student and used to cut study halls, walk over to PAFA, and look at its exhibitions. The student exhibitions were what most inspired me. Seeing the Annual Student Exhibition presentations by painters Mary Nomecos, Stephania Lestier, and Susan Van Campen (who later exhibited at Gross McCleaf) were what prompted me to apply to PAFA and abandon my earlier desire to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the fall of 1970, when I was fourteen, my father took me to Washington, D.C. to see the Mary Cassatt exhibition organized by Adelyn Breeskin for the National Gallery of Art. And in May 1973 I saw the two loan exhibitions PAFA organized of works by women artists. The first, The Pennsylvania Academy and Its Women, included fifty-two works by forty-two women artists born between 1819 and 1899. Its concurrent exhibition was a retrospective with fifty-two works by Susan Macdowell Eakins, the then little-known wife of Thomas Eakins.

When I was sixteen, I’d also seen the Whitney Museum’s two solo exhibitions of Joan Mitchell and Alice Neel. My last two years of high school I sometimes worked Saturdays and part of one summer for Marian Locks. I already knew Elizabeth Osborne, but at Marian’s I became aware of Edna Andrade and Diane Burko’s artwork. The three of them seemed inextricably linked with Marian’s gallery. And I met and saw the work of Elaine Kurtz, who also showed with Marian, and Louise Todd, who were the mothers of high school classmates. When I started classes at PAFA, I was hired as a part guard/weekend catalog salesman at the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center for its Cecilia Beaux exhibition. Organized by PAFA, the Beaux exhibition was presented there because PAFA’s Broad and Cherry Street building was closed while being renovated prior to the upcoming Bicentennial celebrations. I don’t remember if many people came in to see the Beaux exhibition, but I do remember spending hours looking at her paintings.

In the eyes of many artists, Woman’s Work: American Art 1974 was probably the most significant exhibition of all of these. Also presented at the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center, it included works by eighty-one living women artists selected by five women: three curators, one critic, and one artist (whose own work was included in the show). The only artist in it who had previously exhibited at McCleaf was Edith Neff. Martha Mayer Erlebacher and Nora Speyer, also included, would later exhibit at Gross McCleaf.

I organized a lot of group and solo shows. The first group show I organized was works on paper by eight of the older, more established gallery artists. It opened in May 1981, five months after I’d started working there. One of the artists I put in the show was someone I didn’t yet know. They lived nearby yet never came in. I thought including them would be a way to reach out and say “Hello.” I learned how wrong I was when they came in a few days later to scold me vehemently for having put their work in a group show. Apparently, they wanted the spotlight all to themselves: from now on, they warned, only solo shows. I was thrown off balance by the barrage of jealousies, insecurities, and rivalries. Somehow, I became friendly with Dolores Gaughan, who was the secretary for PCA’s Painting Department, and though in different capacities, we were working with many of the same painters. We laughed a lot and teased that we should compare notes and co-write a book about all of them, but we didn’t know if it would be a comedy or a script for a horror film––which made us laugh even more.

One of the most pleasurable and creative parts of the job was when Estelle let me choose and invite artists to have solo exhibitions. Among those were the shows I organized for Louisa Matthiasdottir, Charles Cajori, Sideo Fromboluti, Emily Mason, Wolf Kahn, and Nora Speyer. I also helped organize solo exhibitions for Stanley Lewis and George Nick, who came to the gallery through Martha’s friendship with them. The first person who I invited to have an exhibition there was Joan Mitchell. She was in New York for one week and asked me to come visit with her, have lunch, and see her exhibition at Xavier Fourcade. I took the day off and went to see her. I told her about working in the gallery. I asked if I could organize a show of her pastels, which she liked and was open to. But when we spoke about it with Xavier, he immediately shut us down: “I’ve never heard of Gross McCleaf.” That was crushing to me, and I never told Estelle. I hated that the gallery was discounted, and that it sometimes had a reputation of being staid. All this instilled in me a desire to try to make the gallery a better, of higher quality, and a more important place.