New York (1937 körül)

Very little is known about the life of Jolán Gross. Born in 1900 in Nitra, the daughter of a wealthy middle-class family. In 1918 she was admitted to the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, where her teachers were Aladár Illés Edvi and Róbert Berény. During the White Terror, however, she left Hungary and went to Vienna, where she studied for a year at the Kunstgewerbeschule under Emil Orlik. She moved on from there, too, and in 1920 entered the Berlin College of Fine Arts under Karl Hofer. Berlin was the centre of avant-garde art in the 1920s, where Expressionist and Constructivist artists (Kandinsky, Otto Dix, George Grosz) gathered, the famous Sturm Gallery was opened by Herwarth Walden and for a short time the Bauhaus school was also based there. Gross' entire later artistic career was influenced by her two years in Berlin. .

In 1925, in the United States, she married Frigyes Bettelheim, a Hungarian émigré psychologist, and they moved to Cleveland. From that time on, she retroactively signed her works Gross-Bettelheim (with the letter J at the top of her first name). She continued her studies at the Cleveland School of Art with Henry Kelly. In 1937, she and her husband moved to New York, and Jolán Gross-Bettelheim has since become a prominent figure in the American Precisionist school. From then until 1956, not a year went by that her work was not exhibited in a famous American gallery or museum. These include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The latter currently has eight of her paintings in its collection. 

Jolán Gross-Bettelheim's works from the American period, i.e. from 1925 to 1955, can be divided into three major groups: the first group includes works on the theme of the big city (first Berlin, then Clevland, New York) and the palette. These include the typical metropolitan motifs and suburban attributes without the concrete presence of man: the poles carrying telegraph wires, the ornate lanterns of the turn of the century are part of the motif treasure trove, as are the traverses of high-voltage power lines, chimneys, pipe snakes, bridges, the rails and frame structures of the elevated railway, railings, steel gondolas and pillars. From all of this, the overall picture of a 20th century American metropolis, even New York, emerges, if not through the evocation of the familiar skyscrapers, then through the humanisation and artification of a deeper content, of raw suburban industrial disorder and rampant technology. The other major group of Gross-Bettelheim's works are satirical drawings depicting metropolitan ladies and café gatherings with murderous, absurd humour.They are influenced by German Expressionism and Verism: the sometimes brutal harshness of Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, their alienating, satirical tone. Finally, the third group is made up of left-wing, anti-fascist works. 

The pastel painting New York belongs to the first group. The "ugliness" of the chimneys and antennas of the big city is contrasted by the subtle velvetiness, warmth and homeliness of the pastel. In these motifs, the painter has discovered order, perfection and structure, which she has abstracted from their function. In the same way, she wanted to emphasise in the abstractness and perfection the defect, the lack of spirit. Gross-Bettelheim's pastel paintings have only been shown once in solo exhibitions, but this time in a more prominent venue, the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York. In 1945