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Painter Continued from Page 28
“It’s really meaningful,” Edelson said.

“It gave me a view of my paintings that
I never experienced before, simply
because you don’t have enough space to
show stuff in most places.” (Edelson often
paints on 30-inch-by-40-inch canvases,
emulating the scale of some of her favorite
painters.) It would be accurate, in some sense, to
say that it all started when one of her sons,
Jon, along with his wife, Rachel, decided
that Edelson’s abstract work deserved to be
seen by a wider audience. Rachel Edelson’s
research led her to Art for the Cash Poor,
an exhibition where two of Edelson’s
paintings were displayed, and one was
even sold. Following that, it was decided
that her work merited a full show, and
Edelson was connected with local curator
Amie Potsic.

It would, however, be more accurate
to say that it all started in 1947, when
Edelson (then Zelda Toll) was a senior in
high school.

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Our ‘Seekers of Meaning’
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Zelda Edelson
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Her father was in the wholesale grain business,
working for a pair of race-horse owning Quakers
who wanted to find a way to get cheap grain; her
mother, born outside of Odessa, Ukraine was a
homemaker (they belonged to a synagogue in
Wynnefield-Overbrook, but Judaism was not cen-
tral to their lives, Edelson said). Together with her
two older brothers and her younger sister, Edelson
lived on Millick Street, near 60th and Market
streets, and attended the Girls’ High School of
Philadelphia when it was still located at 17th and
Spring Garden streets.

It was there that she and her sister were intro-
duced to the world of art.

Edelson took a course from experimental art-
ist Jack Bookbinder, prominent in Philadelphia in
his day. Her lifelong love of art was sparked by his
education, and encouraged by her mother — who
herself always remained bitter over being forced to
leave school at a young age — Edelson attended
the University of Chicago, majoring in English lit-
erature. Soon after, she married Marshall Edelson,
a professor of psychiatry at Yale University who
shared her love of literature, if not her passion for
painting. Together, they had three children, and Edelson
SEE PAINTER | Page 32
ROMANCE IN WINTER (2012)
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