Bettina Grossman

 

Bettina Grossman artwork in Chelsea Hotel.  NYT article after she dies.

For much of the 1950s and ’60s, Ms. Grossman worked as an artist in Europe. But after a series of career disappointments, she isolated herself as a permanent resident at the Chelsea for a half-century, fiercely guarding both her privacy and the trove of art she had produced in her prime in New York and Europe.

In “Girl With Black Balloons” (2010), a documentary directed by Corinne van der Borch, a Dutch filmmaker living in Brooklyn, Ms. Grossman said that after the fire had “destroyed my life” she redoubled her commitment to her art, which, she said, precluded her from marrying and having children or even taking time away from her work to promote it.

Ms. Grossman’s myriad frustrations often fueled new works. Once when gazing from her fifth-floor balcony and thinking of jumping, she said, she instead began taking pictures of pedestrians from above and compiled a photo series.

In making her neighborhood rounds, she pushed a shopping cart containing portfolios and samples of her work that she was loath to leave unguarded at home.

In 2007, Sam Bassett, an artist who was a hotel resident at the time, made a documentary about Ms. Grossman called “Bettina.”

“Really, she was suffocating in her own greatness,” he told The New York Times in 2008.

The growing trove of work began hindering her access to the bathroom and kitchen. With little space, she turned to photos and printmaking and slept in a space she cleared by her door.

from earlier article:

Mr. Bassett spent day after day sitting and talking with Ms. Grossman in the hallway outside her door. He was fascinated by her witty, piercing observations and her bold artwork: the huge, stark print of a dandelion leaf plucked from her father’s grave; the evocative series of leaves taken from a plant in the Chelsea neighborhood that was stunted, she said, by years of dog urine. Signs taped to her door declared the apartment “The Institute for Noumenological Research” and listed intellectual, artistic and philosophical principles. Other scrawlings — such as “Help Me, I’m Being Killed” — were more disturbing.

After two months, Mr. Bassett finally entered No. 503 to find that Ms. Grossman was, in fact, fiercely guarding an apartment nearly stuffed to the ceiling with hundreds of boxes, forcing her to live in her hallway and sleep on a deck chair. The boxes turned out to be jam-packed with a voluminous body of artwork, which Ms. Grossman had produced in her prime in New York and Europe.

“We were kindred spirits from the minute I met her,” said Mr. Bassett, who recently completed a documentary about his relationship with Ms. Grossman, which has a certain “Harold and Maude” feel. “I saw right away how brilliant she was, even though she had basically retracted into solitude for 30 years. She was living in her hallway, surrounded by all these boxes, but inside, hidden away, was this incredible body of work. Really, she was suffocating in her own greatness.”