Biography

Biala (b. 1903, Biala, Poland; d. September 24, 2000, Paris, France) was a Polish-born American painter known in Paris and New York for her sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. During her eight-decade career, her work was characterized by a modernist reinterpretation of classical themes of landscapes, still-life, and portraiture, animated gesturally with punctuated brush work held fast by her keen eye for observation.

As an immigrant arriving from a Russian-occupied Poland to a Jewish tenement house on the Lower East Side in New York in 1913, Biala, then Janice Tworkov, faced a new culture and adolescence at the same time. Decamping to Greenwich Village with her older brother, Jack Tworkov, she became immersed in a bohemian life. Like Jack, Janice was an avid reader, with The Three Musketeers​ being her favorite book. She would later tell French novelist and art theorist André Malraux that it was because of Porthos that she became an artist.

While visiting an exhibition of French painting at the Brooklyn Museum in the Spring of 1921, Janice discovered the work of Cézanne. She enrolled in classes at the Art Students League and the School of the National Academy of Design. In the fall of 1922, Janice came upon the work of Edwin Dickinson who inspired her, in the summer of 1923, to hitchhike to Provincetown to study with him.

By late 1920, Janice was an established artist with a growing reputation. She was a frequent exhibitor at the G.R.D. Studios (NY), a gallery that would fuel the careers of many important American artists. She remained at the forefront of the fledgling art colonies of Provincetown, MA, and Woodstock, NY, generating close friendships with Dickinson and another prominent American artist, William Zorach. In fact, it was at the suggestion of Zorach that Janice changed her name to simply Biala, after the town where she was born, so as not to confuse her work with that of her brother.

During a fateful trip to Paris in 1930, Biala met and fell in love with the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. A formidable figure among writers, artists and the transatlantic intelligentsia, Ford introduced Biala to the many artists within his circle forging a new Modernism in France including Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Upon Ford’s death in 1939, she fled Europe under the growing Nazi threat and in a harrowing feat rescued Ford’s personal library and manuscripts while carrying as much of her own work as she could.

Returning to New York City, Biala became a fixture among the rising avant-garde artists living and working around Washington Square. She met and married Daniel “Alain” Brustlein, a noted illustrator for The New Yorker. While her work was represented by galleries rooted in European Modernism, namely the Bignou Gallery, she was one of the few women influencing the rising Abstract Expressionist movement in New York.

In October 1947, Biala and Brustlein boarded the French Line’s de Grasse, one of the first transatlantic ships to sail to Europe after the war. They settled in Paris but almost immediately began traveling throughout Europe, encountering the histories of cities such as Rome and Pompeii. This was the beginning of a lifetime split between Paris and New York

In April 1950 in New York City, Biala was one of only three women—the other two were Louise Bourgeois and Hedda Sterne—invited to attend a private and exclusive discussion known as the Artist’s Session at Studio 35. The Whitney Museum of American Art became the first public institution to acquire Biala’s work in 1955. In April 1956, a feature article, “Biala Paints a Picture,” appeared in Art News with photographs by Rudy Burckhardt. A series of exhibitions in the late 1950s celebrated her newfound appreciation for collage.

During the 1960s and into the 1970s, Biala completed many of her largest scale works to date. These include works that incorporate painting and collage, expanding on the themes of interiors and portraiture. Variations of the open window, not unlike Matisse’s Open Window, Collioure (1905), also appear this period. Additionally, a concert of studies and paintings on Diego Velázquez’s Equestrian Portrait of Elisabeth of France (c.1635) or Reine Isabella, demonstrate Biala's continued interest in Velázquez and Spain. Lastly, views of the storied cities of Poitiers in France and Spoletto in Italy are uniquely associated with these decades as is the incorporation of painted collaged elements.

Biala continued to exhibit internationally during the final decades of her life. Major themes dominating the early part of these final decades include large sweeping landscapes featuring the shores of Provincetown or the sea circling Venice. A return to the architecture of Paris appears in a series of major paintings focused on Notre Dame. Themes of interiors as well as a return to compositions inspired by Velázquez dominate these later years. Her work continued to meld abstraction with imagist concerns. Works are described as “intimate,” “alluring,” and “secretive.”

In June 1989, The New York Times published “Three Who Were Warmed by the City of Light” by Michael Brenson featuring Biala, Joan Mitchell and Shirley Jaffe. Upon her death in 2000, her obituary appears in The New York Times written by Roberta Smith. According to Smith, “[her art] spanned two art capitals and several generations […] belonging to a trans-Atlantic tradition that included French painters like Matisse, Bonnard and Marquet, as well as Milton Avery and Edward Hopper.”