NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- It’s not a good sign when you step into an art exhibition and immediately begin to reinstall it in your head. But don’t hold that against “Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art,” a crowded, enthralling exhibition at the Jewish Museum with a fascinating back story that is rarely told on this scale. It recounts the life of a long-running influential art gallery and, by extension, of the person who willed it into existence.

That person, Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970), was a formidable, feisty and sometimes manipulative self-starter with an ecumenical eye, a passion for art and an inborn instinct for sales and promotion. Halpert was central to establishing the market for between-the-wars American art and thought that everyone should own art. She liked to keep prices low, would sell on the installment plan and staged annual holiday sales. She also thought that anyone could make art, an idea that was crucial to the folk art revival of the 1930s. For her time, she was unusually open to artists of color and, to some extent, women. (In the 1950s, she took on a group of mostly abstract painters, all men — as confirmed in a Life magazine photograph — but few remembered.)

Born in Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine), in 1900, Halpert came to New York with her mother and sister in 1905. Her father, a grain merchant, had died of tuberculosis the previous year, and the pogroms that followed the 1905 Russian Revolution threatened. While still a teenager she pursued her dream of being an artist, studying at 14 (she pretended to be 16) at the National Academy of Design, and then the Art Students League. She haunted the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the city’s few art galleries, and frequented any artists’ club or gathering she could find.

Also starting in her teens, the energetic Halpert worked to support her family and gain her independence, first in New York department stores and then as a successful efficiency expert in a bank. By 25, she was one of two female business executives in the city and quite well-off.

In 1926, realizing that neither she nor her husband, the painter Samuel Halpert — whom she married at 18 — would ever become great artists, Halpert decided to seek them out instead. (Her disappointment hastened the pair’s divorce.) She became the first woman in New York to open a commercial art gallery, in a townhouse at 113 West 13th Street (still standing), purchased with saved bonuses. Called Our Gallery for a year, and then renamed the Downtown Gallery, the enterprise endured for over 40 years. Although she relocated uptown 14 years later, Halpert initially wanted to be where most of New York’s artists lived and worked.

From the early 1930s to the mid ’50s, she was arguably New York’s most powerful dealer of contemporary art. She mostly lived above the store and cultivated collectors and museum professionals across the nation — often traveling her exhibitions to university galleries. In the early years she kept her gallery afloat with extensive sales of folk art to her chief client, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) who in 1929 helped to found the Museum of Modern Art.

Of the 90 paintings and sculptures in this show, nearly all were exhibited or sold by Halpert’s gallery, or were in her private collection. One of the first artists she showed, to the outrage of her neighbors, was the jazz-loving proto-Pop abstract painter Stuart Davis, whose seven works look especially great here. She sold nothing of his, but it was the beginning of a rocky relationship that produced nine solo shows.

In 1932, with Ben Shahn’s second solo (of 11) at the gallery, she debuted his Social Realist masterpiece, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti,” based on the infamous trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, which attracted lots of negative publicity — and hence visitors. (Halpert extended the show and did quite well on sales.) Another long-running relationship was with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the Japanese-born American artist who elevated naturalist painting to a dreamy visual poetry, as in the exhibition “Little Joe With Cow,” with its great bovine wreathed in wispy plant life.

With her friend Alain Locke, the writer and theorist of black culture, Halpert organized “Negro Art in America,” a survey of 41 artists that was the first such exhibition in a New York gallery. It was preceded by her show of Jacob Lawrence, which unveiled his heroic “Migration” series; Halpert orchestrated the joint acquisition of its 60 gouaches by the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art. Lawrence is represented here by four works from his less familiar, less anguished “The Harlem Series” of 1943.

The catalog explains how Halpert badgered other dealers to collaborate with her. She wrested Kuniyoshi away from Charles Daniels and urged Alfred Stieglitz, the godfather of early American modernism, to share. But she had to wait until Stieglitz’s death in 1946 to exhibit Arthur Dove, and finally, briefly, Georgia O’Keeffe, who created two of the show’s strongest works: her “Poppies” (1950), with its flowing petals and richly colored stamen, and his “Snowstorm” (1935), whose ambiguous forms include a wind-battered row of trees that can morph into an angry, seven-legged feline.

From the past, Halpert resurrected the Quaker “primitive” Edward Hicks, represented here by an especially impressive, uncluttered “Peaceable Kingdom,” and the American trompe l’oeil artists William Michael Hartnett and John Frederick Peto.

Peto’s “Lincoln and the Star of David” is in the last, best gallery of the show. Devoted to Halpert’s own collection, it is a touching affirmation that, business aside, she really did love art. Also here is a painted ceramic portrait head of Halpert from 1959 by the sculptor William King, one of the last artists she discovered. It is absolutely irresistible and should have been in the first gallery, luring visitors in. It pays tribute to Halpert’s sometimes overly possessive love of her artists and the love many of them felt, intermittently, in return.

Why is Halpert almost completely forgotten today? Her gallery — dominated by figurative art — was obscured by the advent of Abstract Expressionism and its dealers in the ’50s. That she was a woman, an immigrant and a Jew may have contributed to her disappearance.

But art galleries are by definition fluid and ephemeral: self-created worlds characterized by changing shows and changing addresses. Most are built to vanish. Their main job is to help artists survive, which is accomplished by dispersing, i.e., selling the things they make. Reassembling those artworks can be a tall order.

And here that order has been met with considerable success by Rebecca Shaykin, an associate curator who has also written a smart, readable catalog that builds on Lindsay Pollock’s extensively researched Halpert biography of 2006. The catalog has the advantage of lavish illustrations that make you see that the show could have been even better where several artists are concerned. But what Shaykin has accomplished is amazing.

My biggest complaint concerns the elimination of Halpert’s middle name — her adopted maiden name — from the show’s and catalog’s title. To me, she will always be Edith Gregor Halpert, which is prolonged and stately.

Edith Gregor Halpert. It has all the majesty of an ocean liner sailing into New York Harbor.

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