Exhibition News: Biala / 40 yrs of painting at Berry Campbell (Mar 14-Apr 13)
Biala (1903-2000) "Le Louvre," 1948, oil on canvas, 36 x 28 1/4 in (91.4 x 71.8 cm) [CR753]
Biala: Paintings, 1946-1986
March 14 - April 13, 2024
Opening reception: Thursday, March 14, 6-8pm
Berry Campbell
524 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
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NEW YORK, NY – Berry Campbell and the Estate of Janice Biala are pleased to announce a major survey of paintings by Janice Biala (1903-2000). The survey featuring over 20 paintings dating from 1946 to 1986, marks the largest gallery exhibition of Biala's work mounted in New York City with many works on view for the first time. A fully illustrated 100-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition which includes introduction by Mary Gabriel, author of “The Ninth Street Women,” and essay by Jason Andrew, manager and curator of the Estate of Janice Biala. This historic presentation coincides with the Grey Art Museum’s seminal exhibition “Americans in Paris, 1946-1962: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962,” opening March 2 in which Biala will be featured.
"Portrait of Biala" photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson
© Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos
One of the most inventive artists of the 20th Century, and the painter most closely aligned with the continuation of a transatlantic Modernist dialogue between Paris and New York, Janice Biala (1903-2000), led a legendary life: a painter recognized for her distinctive style that combined the sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the gestural virtuosity of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism.
Biala rose from humble yet tumultuous beginnings as a Jewish immigrant from Russian occupied Poland arriving in New York in 1913 settling among the tenements of the Lower East Side. She claimed the name of her birthplace for her own, going on to make personal and unique contributions to the rise of Modernism both in Paris and New York.
Having spent the decade of the 1930s as the last companion to the English novelist, Ford Madox Ford, Biala was the perfect representative of American bohemia in 1930s France and her journey as an artist evolved in tandem with the historic events of the 20th century.
Highlighting this survey is a pivotal group of paintings dating from 1947 to1952. On view for the first time in New York, these works were painted by Biala upon her triumphant return to Paris in 1947 aboard the de Grasse, one of the first passenger transatlantic ships to sail from New York to Europe after World War II. Her return was also a joyous one, “I still find in France all the things I’d hoped for,” she wrote her brother Jack Tworkov, “I’d have no use for Paradise if it wasn’t like France.” These works offer an extraordinary opportunity to see Biala’s close connection to European Modernists like Picasso and Matisse, both of whom she had frequently met.
“Though her themes of still life and interiors, landscapes and portraiture remained constant, her approach to portraying them evolved,” writes Jason Andrew in essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition:
“Impressionism is a term rarely used in discussing Biala’s work, but it fits with her sensitivity and narrative. Never liberal with factual description in her paintings, Biala pulls us in through a balance of subtle truths—the hard edge of a table, the soft outline of a figure, the dark shadow of a building. It’s a tender abstraction that feels lived in, and one which she honed very early on from her mentor Edwin Dickinson and heightened by the vigilant study of the narratives crafted by Ford Madox Ford.”
Biala (1903-2000) "Nature Morte à la Table," 1948, Oil on canvas, 31 1/4 x 45 in (79.4 x 114.3 cm) [CR754]
“Le Louvre,” 1948, is among this group and one of the first paintings to fully capture the architecture of Biala's adopted city. A seminal work, the painting features a view of the city from the Left Bank looking North across the Seine with views of the Louvre and the Jardins des Champs-Élysées. More specifically, Pavillon de la Trémoille appears on the upper left and the various rooftops that make up the Louvre filling the horizon. Pont de Arts stretches horizontally through the painting’s center left. Framing the composition is an iron railing in the near foreground.
Alongside this historic group of paintings, Berry Campbell will present important large-scale works including multi-paneled paintings which bridge American and European traditions—portraying a synthesis of cultures and emotions. As an example, the two paneled work “Intérieur à grand plans noirs, blancs, rose,” 1972, on view for the first time, embraces Biala’s suggestive approach to space. “Here the continuity of reading the painting from left to right is deprioritized in order to offer multiple vignettes—evocative impressions and multiple views of an interior where angles are represented by juxtaposition of color,” writes Jason Andrew.
Biala (1903-2000) "Les Fleurs," 1973, acrylic on canvas (three parts), overall: 45 x 108 in (114.3 x 276.9 cm) [CR066]
In the epic three paneled painting “Les Fleurs,” 1973, three differing perspectives vie for sovereignty as each offers an individually composed interior with bold and blocked in color—bare of human presence. Here the flourishing potted flowers bring the personality.
The exhibition also features a gallery dedicated to Biala’s works on paper and in particular, her collage work. As the artist noted, towards the end of the 1950s, her transatlantic returns from Paris to New York took their toll on her paintings. So, she turned her attention to collage. Embracing the “immediate effects,” which “you can’t possibly get in painting,” Biala embarked on an intense exploration of the medium. The subjects in Biala’s collages range from intimate interiors to the wild and thrilling portrayal of a cassowary.
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Biala Paints a Picture: Summers in Spoleto
Biala (1903-2000) “Open Window: Spolète,” (1965-1968), oil on canvas, 63 3/4 x 44 3/4 in (161.9 x 113.7 cm) Photo Roz Akin
During the summers of 1965-1968, Biala attended the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. Her stay inspired several paintings and works on paper. Jason Andrew, Director of the Estate of Janice Biala, takes a took at one painting above all which celebrates Biala’s love, friendship, and appreciation of Henri Matisse.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) “Open Window, Collioure,” 1905, oil on canvas, 21 3/4 x 18 1/8 in (55.25 x 46.04 cm) Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney (1998.74.7)
Biala discovered for the first time the works of Matisse when the Brooklyn Museum opened an exhibition of French painting in the spring of 1921. It was a lasting and profound experience, one after which both Biala and her older brother Jack Tworkov decided to dedicate their lives to becoming artists. Tworkov said he “never forgot the impact of Cézanne, whose ‘anxieties and difficulties’ came to mean more to him than Matisse’s liberty and sophistication.” Biala on the other hand, though drawn to Cézanne’s structured compositions, would come to assimilate Matisse’s color and sensibility.
Biala first met Matisse during the decade of the 1930s by way of introduction through her lover and companion, the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Biala would meet Matisse again visiting him in early 1954. Upon hearing of the death of the artist, Biala wrote that she “always had Matisse in my belly.”
Widely described as an icon of early modernism, Matisse’s small but explosive work titled Open Window, Collioure (1905), is heralded as one of the most important early paintings in the style of les Fauves.
Like Matisse’s Open Window, Biala’s painting belies an optical and conceptual complexity in which conventional representation is subordinated throughout by other pictorial concerns. Both paintings offer a vantage point upon a vantage point as the view moves from the interior of a room, to the open window, to the view point of the landscape beyond. In the case of Matisse, he offers the view of Collioure and the densely packed view of boats rocking on the French Mediterranean coast. For Biala, she offers a view of Spoleto the mountainous city in Umbria, Italy, which at the time had been reinvented by the summer Festival dei Due Mondi.
Biala first traveled to Spoleto in the summer of 1965 at the invitation of her friend the “the doyenne of international culture,” Priscilla Morgan, who at the time was the associate director of the beloved festival. Morgan is credited with bringing about a renaissance to the festival extending invitations to other artists, Isamu Noguchi, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller and musicians Philip Glass, Lukas Foss, and Charles Wadsworth among others.
Biala painted Spolète over three years likely taking sketches back to her Paris studio in the 7th arrondissement made from her summer visits. Subtly incorporating a series of variations on variations, this painting is Biala’s perfect assimilation of both the School of Paris and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism.
This historic work is now available at Berry Campbell.