I first came across the name of the artist Etelka J. Greenfield on a program for a 1948 exhibit at the Pyramid Club in Philadelphia. The club had been formed a decade earlier as a social and cultural organization for African American men, and its annual art exhibit was one of its flagship events.
The exhibits featured black and white, male and female artists from Philadelphia and other cities. Some of the country’s premier African American artists – many of whom were yet to be recognized as such – were chosen to display their works. Greenfield was among the female artists welcomed to exhibit at a club that disallowed women as members.
I bought the Pyramid Club program at auction several years ago, and subsequently went about researching its female exhibitors. I could find out very little information about most of them, including Greenfield. I was able to interview artist Sarai Sherman, a white artist, after her son came across my blog post.
When I researched Greenfield, I could find only one painting by her and only a brief mention of who she was. The auction house that sold the painting – titled “Design for Centerpiece” – described her a “ground breaking African American artist and a member of the Pyramid Club of Philadelphia.” I mentioned that bit of info in my blog post about the female artists, and a reader later emailed me to say: “Don’t believe she was African American. Married to Philadelphia Jewish financier Albert Greenfield.”
Now I figured it was time to determine the identity of Etelka J. Greenfield. So I dug deeper into my research, and a little more information began to emerge.
I found out that she was not an African American artist, but a white artist and was in fact the wife of Albert M. Greenfield who was something of a renaissance man: “real estate mogul, banker, department store developer, mortgage financier, motion-picture theater owner, hotelier and philanthropist.”
A Russian immigrant, Albert Greenfield snubbed his nose at Philadelphia’s business elite, forging relationships with those who would be considered outsiders. In 1939, his real estate company assisted Raymond Pace Alexander, an African American lawyer who handled many desegregation cases in the Philadelphia area. Pace represented a poor black couple who had come into some money and wanted to put it into renovating a dilapidated block of tenement homes. The couple stipulated that most of the work be done by black men.
Also in the 1930s Greenfield apparently was associated with the Bureau of Colored Children, a child-care agency for neglected children that also offered a foster care program.
Albert and Etelka married in 1937, the second marriage for both of them (here’s a photo from their wedding day). Etelka’s first husband was a real estate broker and associate of Greenfield’s. Her first marriage ended in divorce and the couple had a daughter. Albert’s first wife left him after 21 years of marriage and five children for another man.
I learned more about Etelka Greenfield as an artist after coming across her 1949 obituary on the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation website, on other sites and in the newspaper archives at Temple University in Philadelphia. Some of her papers are at the Smithsonian in Washington, and a staffer emailed me a copy of a posthumous exhibition of her works.
Greenfield was born Etelka Joseph around 1887 in Cincinnati, OH, and at some point the family moved to New York. She graduated from Dr. Sacks School for Girls in New York, and studied for five years in France and Switzerland.
She was described as a widely known portrait, still life and landscape painter. Her works were exhibited in galleries around the country, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and the Woodmere Galleries (now Woodmere Art Museum), both in Philadelphia, and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.
Greenfield became interested in art through John Hussian, whose lectures she attended at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. At first, she worked alone and then with Hussian. For the five years before her death, she studied with portrait painter Lazar Raditz, according to an “appreciation” in a posthumous memorial exhibit program in 1949.
She was a director of Graduate Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania and the National Agricultural College in Doylestown, PA. She was involved with the Federation of Jewish Charities, and was a member of the Philadelphia Art Alliance and Artists Equity. She was a charter member of the Contemporary Art Association.
Greenfield died on May 29, 1949, in her home in Philadelphia after being ill for several months.
That November, Raditz and Albert Greenfield mounted a memorial exhibition of her works at the John Wanamaker Gallery, on the eighth floor of one of the oldest and distinguished department stores in the country. The exhibit included 65 of her paintings, and the program offered comments from Raditz, Albert Greenfield and Dorothy Grafly, a noted local art critic. Grafly also attended art shows at the Pyramid Club, and wrote about some African American artists at the time, including Dox Thrash and Claude Clark.
Grafly wrote the “appreciation” in the November exhibit catalog, which offered a few more details about Greenfield:
“No matter how pressing her social and family engagements, she shut her studio door behind her every afternoon to wrestle with creative problems. She learned to simplify through selection. The yellow background drapes of earlier attempts gave place to an almost austere pearl gray – the color of her studio walls. As a result her most recent still-lifes pose the difficult problem of painting objects light in color against a high-keyed background, while at the same time controlling the illusion of form through adroit handling of light and shade.”
“There is controlled austerity in her arrangement of objects; yet tenderness in her painting of them. As a disciplined artist she knew the importance of space, color and tone relationships, and, although her work remained realistic, she had a basic abstract approach to form.
“Eight years of grueling study preceded her first submission to a jury for an annual national exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her canvas was accepted. The following year her work was invited to an important national exhibition in Toledo, Ohio, and she began to exhibit at Woodmere Art Gallery, at the Contemporary Art Association of Philadelphia and in New York. Yet, with characteristic restraint, she still hesitated to stage a one-man show.”
