Bettina was much more than an eccentric from the Chelsea Hotel
One evening in November, a procession of young artists, critics and curators climbed the creaking stairs of a building in Lower Manhattan's Chinatown to attend an opening at a bustling little gallery, Ulrik. The show, “Bettina: New York 1965-1986”, consisted of rarely seen photographs and sculptures by an enigmatic artist who lived for five decades in the legendary Chelsea Hotel, where she created her works in a cluttered fifth-floor apartment until her death in 2021.
Writers from Artforum and Frieze made their way through the crowd to get a glimpse of the black and white street photography. Students at the Pratt Institute drank cans of Budweiser as they studied the undulating wooden sculptures. A Museum of Modern Art curator in 1976 viewed grainy footage of the artist filming herself taking the photographs of the Manhattan skyscrapers now in the exhibition.
The show's gallerists, Anya Komar, 37, and Alex Fleming, 39, immediately sold three pieces. Some of Bettina's old neighbors at the Chelsea Hotel showed up, including her longtime caregiver, Rachel Cohen, a jewelry and eyewear store owner. designer who has lived in the building since the 1970s.
“Everyone at the Chelsea Hotel knew that Bettina's art should be appreciated, but for some reason that didn't happen for her,” Ms. Cohen, 74, said after the opening. “So that evening in the gallery seemed impossible to me. Everyone was so young and different. I was happy to see her art appreciated. Bettina was not an easy person. She was rarely happy with anything, but I think she would have loved it.”
“I think most who came that night didn't know much about her life,” she continued, “so they only saw her art itself, and they couldn't judge it by her life at the Chelsea Hotel.”
Eventually the crowd moved to a nearby bar, the River, a meeting point for the downtown arts crowd. They stayed past midnight, drinking martinis and discussing Bettina's geometric paintings and black-and-white marble block sculptures.
Ulrik has now sold almost all the pieces in the exhibition, which runs until February 1. A review in New York magazine, n+1 editor Tess Edmonson called the show a “concise and modest selection from an artist whose legacy had been nearly forgotten.” And fresh critics like Sean Tatol stopped by during their gallery rounds. In the Manhattan Art Review he called Bettina's work “exactly on time for sympathetic and almost relaxed nostalgia,” comparing it favorably to the creations of conceptual artist Dan Graham.
Bettina, who died aged 94, had an uneasy relationship with the art world, but it is not difficult to speculate that she would have appreciated her new fans discovering her as an artist, and not as an eccentric denizen of the Chelsea Hotel.
“Bettina became part of the Chelsea Hotel legend, but that's not the most interesting thing about her,” said Mr. Fleming, the gallerist. “You could say it's funny that the work of a 20th century modernist missing female artist has found its way to the Clandestino and Dimes Square crowd, but all that matters to us is that people are finally coming to see Bettina's work .”
She was born Bettina Grossman in 1927 and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. While pursuing her art in Europe as a young woman, she shed her full name and adopted the mononym Bettina. She made marble sculptures in Italy and studied stained glass in France. She cut a dashing figure as she drove sports cars through the Alps and broke hearts.
She returned to New York in her thirties and began working from a studio in Brooklyn Heights. A fire destroyed all her work there in 1966. The incident left her deeply protective of her art and suspicious of sharing it with others.
Bettina soon moved to the Chelsea Hotel, joining former residents such as Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, and devoted herself to rebuilding the work lost in the fire. When her attempts to find recognition in the male-dominated art world came to naught, she delved deeper into her work in Room 503.
As a changing city encroached on the bohemian haven of the Chelsea Hotel, Bettina outlasted other tenants. She installed heavy locks on her door. She wore sunglasses as she wandered the halls with a shopping cart filled with her wallets. Her apartment eventually collected so much of her art that she began sleeping in a lawn chair in her hallway. She avoided an eviction in 2006 and continued to pay a few hundred dollars a month in rent thanks to her apartment's rent-regulated status.
She ignored questions from journalists who visited her looking for a story, but did place some trust in filmmaker Corinne van der Borch. In her 2010 documentary, “Girl with Black Balloons,” Ms. van der Borch introduces Bettina as “a woman living in the shadow of Chelsea” who “has locked herself away for more than 40 years.” In the film, Bettina explains her lonely way of life: “The only way you can do such beautiful things is to isolate yourself from reality, from friends, from family, from the messy situation outside.”
A group led by BD Hotels, which operates the Bowery and Jane hotels, pre-purchased the Chelsea $250 million in 2016 and began a long and costly redevelopment. Bettina died the year before the building's transformation into a luxury boutique hotel was completed. Today, the suites start at around $700 per night, and there are still more than 40 residential tenants on the floors.
Towards the end of her life, Bettina's art received some attention attention through the efforts of Yto Barrada, a visual artist represented by Pace Gallery who became fascinated by her work after seeing Ms. van der Borch's documentary. When Ms. Barrada, 52, read the coverage of Bettina, she became frustrated by how little attention was paid to her art.
She spent time with Bettina and warmed her up to the idea of a shared show Governor's Island, and the resulting exhibition became Bettina's first public showing of her art in some 40 years. Ms. Barrada also included Bettina in a group show for which she curated MoMAand she facilitated the publication of a monograph: “Bettina”, with Aperture.
After her deadMs. Barrada bought decades' worth of work from her brother, Morty Grossman, and its messy mass was shipped from the Chelsea Hotel to Brooklyn. But Ms. Barrada ran into difficulties when she looked for a gallery to represent the estate: the blue chips didn't feel compelled and other galleries seemed hesitant.
Mrs. Komar and Mr. Fleming enter.
The couple met in their late 20s during the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. Mrs Komarborn in Moscow and studying at the CUNY Graduate Center, hopes to write her dissertation on Bettina. Mr. Fleming, a Detroit native who once managed an anarchist space on the Lower East Side, taught Bettina's work to art students at Harvard when he was an assistant instructor there. They never met Bettina and harbor mild envy towards those who did.
Recently in Ulrik's space on Canal Street, the two gallerists discussed their mission to reimagine Bettina's story.
“When I give gallery tours, I feel a sense of responsibility when I talk about her life,” Mr. Fleming said. “Visitors ask me, 'Did she really go around with a shopping cart?' And I answer cautiously, because there is a skill in the shopping cart stories, and I want it to stop.”
Ms Komar said: “The fact that she was seen as some kind of bag lady, that her art is overshadowed by those stories, makes us angry.”
She added: “It is absurd that someone who clings to their art is seen as a hoarder. We could all use more storage space in New York. What New Yorker is not a hoarder, if you think about it.
Regarding Bettina's photo series “Phenomenological New York,” Mr. Fleming questioned the story of the 1966 fire.
“People say that Bettina became paranoid after the fire, that she became convinced that people were stealing ideas from her,” he said. “But I don't think she was delusional. It is absolutely reasonable that the ideas of a brilliant female artist of her time would be stolen.”
Later that evening, they went to Ms. Barrada's studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to discuss an upcoming performance she was giving at Ulrik. Billed as 'Bettina Unboxing Day', and planned For Saturday, Ms. Barrada plans to examine unopened boxes of Bettina's art as an act of collective discovery.
Ms. Barrada's sheep doodle, Patchwork, greeted the two gallerists as she showed them some of Bettina's personal belongings: an old Olympia typewriter, Xerox portfolios. There was also an envelope with six names scrawled on it in blue ink: “Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Hepworth, Bourgeois, Krasner, Nevelson.”
“All female artists,” Ms. Barrada said. “This gives an idea of what she was thinking about. She knew she should be on this list.”
It was dark when the two gallerists went to U-Haul's storage facility in Gowanus, where more of Bettina's belongings are kept. They took a freight elevator to a maze-like floor full of storage spaces. There was a sharp smell when Bettina's two plots were opened. The miscellaneous items consisted of twisted wood and yellowed newspaper clippings, a Russian verb finder and stacks of paintings. In a tube with a shipping sticker from the Chelsea Hotel, they found colorful geometric drawings.
“We've never seen this before,” Ms. Komar said. “When you see all this, it is clear that there are more exhibitions to come.”
Mr. Fleming grew thoughtful as he examined the dusty piles.
“I always think about what Bettina would think about what we do,” he said. “Honestly, I don't know if she would have liked us snooping through her things, but I think she would appreciate our advocacy.”
“If she had been recognized during her lifetime and allowed herself to be distracted by the outside world, the irony is that she would not have done all this work,” Mr Fleming added. “The unknown path allowed her to create art in a way that others cannot. Now we're just trying to meet Bettina on her own terms.”