It’s not a good sign when you step into an art exhibition and immediately begin to reinstall it in your head. But don’t hold that against “Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art,” a crowded, enthralling exhibition at the Jewish Museum with a fascinating back story that is rarely told on this scale. It recounts the life of a long-running influential art gallery and, by extension, of the person who willed it into existence.

That person, Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970), was a formidable, feisty and sometimes manipulative self-starter with an ecumenical eye, a passion for art and an inborn instinct for sales and promotion. Halpert was central to establishing the market for between-the-wars American art and thought that everyone should own art. She liked to keep prices low, would sell on the installment plan and staged annual holiday sales. She also thought that anyone could make art, an idea that was crucial to the folk art revival of the 1930s. For her time, she was unusually open to artists of color and, to some extent, women. (In the 1950s, she took on a group of mostly abstract painters, all men — as confirmed in a Life magazine photograph — but few remembered.)

Born in Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine), in 1900, Halpert came to New York with her mother and sister in 1905. Her father, a grain merchant, had died of tuberculosis the previous year, and the pogroms that followed the 1905 Russian Revolution threatened. While still a teenager she pursued her dream of being an artist, studying at 14 (she pretended to be 16) at the National Academy of Design, and then the Art Students League. She haunted the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the city’s few art galleries, and frequented any artists’ club or gathering she could find.

Also starting in her teens, the energetic Halpert worked to support her family and gain her independence, first in New York department stores and then as a successful efficiency expert in a bank. By 25, she was one of two female business executives in the city and quite well-off.