Edith Schloss (German born American, 1919-2011) is best known for knowing "everyone who counted in Manhattan's legendary postwar art scene." From the moment she was first introduced to Willem de Kooning by her friend Fairfield Porter, she became an integral member of the Chelsea-New York art scene, which flourished around the New York School and included photographer, painter, and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt (whom she married in 1946) and the Jane Street Group around the artist Nell Blaine. It was an era closely charted in her 2021 posthumous memoir, The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly; Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011.

Born in Offenbach, Germany, Schloss studied languages and art as a young student. She came to America by way of England in the early ‘40s, studying at the Art Students League of New York with Will Barnet, Harry Sternberg and Morris Kantor. Schloss exhibited in numerous galleries in New York beginning in the mid-1940s, including in the legendary cooperatives Tanager Gallery, Workshop Gallery, and Jane Street Group. In 1962, with her marriage to Rudy growing strained, she left for Italy with the intent of staying three months—she stayed for a lifetime. In 1964, she opened her first exhibition at the Galleria Aleph in Rome, followed by countless others throughout Italy over the years.

Schloss's passion for the paintbrush was only matched by her passion for the pen. She became the leading cultural voice in Italy as Art Editor for the International Herald Tribune from 1968 to 1986. Later she wrote regularly for Wanted in Rome. The experience of New York, Rome and the Mediterranean offered Schloss a wide range of stimuli and inspiration. Yet over time her work grew more and more focused on the intimate and the sublime. She sought the “quiet and balance in still lifes of homespun objects lined up against the pageant of the sea." She continued to write and paint until her death in Rome in 2011.