Review (via de Tagesspiegel): Malen im Hier und Jetzt
Installation featuring Untitled (Three Glasses) 1962 by Janice Biala in Die Form der Freiheit: Internationale Abstraktion nach 1945 (The Form of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945). Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany, June 4-September 25, 2022. Image: Courtesy Museum Barberini
Painting in the here and now
by Fernhard Schulz
The prelude is a painting in light tones by Janice Biala. Born in 1903 in Poland, which was then part of Russia, she emigrated to the USA with her family in 1913. In 1952 she painted the picture that is now displayed so prominently in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam.
Her name is not among those mentioned in connection with post-war American art. Just as little as that of Hedda Sterne, whose dark-colored painting "NY #7" was created in 1955 and hung nearby. Only the small-format works by Jackson Pollock on the left (“The Teacup”, 1946) and Arshile Gorky on the right (“Pastorale”, 1945), who died early, provide support for the memory.
Rediscovered Artists
The start is program. With the exhibition entitled “The Form of Freedom”, curator Daniel Zamani wants to present “International Abstraction after 1945”, from Europe and North America, and wants to tread well-trodden paths and leave them at the same time. Committing by presenting works by all the artists famous as abstract artists, such as Mark Rothko , Willem de Kooning or Barnett Newman, but leaving at the same time by adding those overlooked to the list of 52 participating artists. Most of them are female artists, of whom only a few, like Lee Krasner or Helen Frankenthaler, have achieved the same visibility in the art world.
Exhibition News (via Artful Daily): The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction After 1945
The exhibition focuses on the two most important currents of abstraction following World War II: Abstract Expressionism in the United States and Art Informel in western Europe.
Janice Biala, Untitled (Still Life with Three Glasses), 1962. Oil and collage on canvas, 162,6 x 145,4 cm. Collection Richard and Karen Duffy, Chicago. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022 Image: McCormick Gallery, Chicago
Jackson Pollock, Composition No. 16, 1948. Oil on canvas 56,5 × 39,5 cm. Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden © Pollock-Krasner Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. ... To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time. - Adolph Gottlieb, 1947
The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945 is a major new traveling exhibition debuting at the Museum Barberini, in Potsdam, Germany, on June 4, 2022.
The exhibition focuses on the two most important currents of abstraction following World War II: Abstract Expressionism in the United States and Art Informel in western Europe. The Shape of Freedom is the first exhibition to explore this transatlantic dialogue in art from the mid-1940s to the end of the Cold War.
The show comprises around 100 works by over 50 artists including Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, K. O. Götz, Georges Mathieu, Lee Krasner, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Judit Reigl, and Clyfford Still. Works on loan come from over 30 international museums and private collections including the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, the Tate Modern in London, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
After its opening run in Potsdam, a version of the exhibition will travel to the Albertina modern in Vienna (opening October 15, 2022) and then the Munchmuseet in Oslo.
Ortrud Westheider, Director of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, said, “The paintings in the exhibition bear witness to the tremendous longing for artistic freedom that emerged on both sides of the Atlantic after 1945. The Hasso Plattner Collection, with important works by Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, and Sam Francis, served as our point of departure. The concept developed by our curator Daniel Zamani was so convincing that the Albertina modern in Vienna and the Munchmuseet in Oslo agreed to host the exhibition as well. I am delighted to see this European cooperation.”
World War II was a turning point in the development of modern painting. The presence of exiled European avant-garde artists in America transformed New York into a center of modernism that rivaled Paris and set new artistic standards. In the mid-1940s, a young generation of artists in both the United States and Europe turned their back on the dominant stylistic directions of the interwar years. Instead of figurative painting or geometric abstraction they embraced a gestural, expressive handling of form, color, and material—a radically experimental approach that transcended traditional conceptions of painting. Artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann, and Joan Mitchell discovered an intersubjective form of expression in action painting, while the color field painting of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still presented viewers with an overwhelming visual experience.
FROM THE ARCHIVE: Biala and the Notre Dame paintings
Biala (1903-2000), Notre Dame II [CR 040], 1985, Oil on canvas, 51 x 77 in (132.1 x 195.6 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York
As an icon of Gothic architecture, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame has inspired artists for centuries. Many artists, among them Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, would return again and again to the same vantage point throughout their careers to paint its towering magnificence.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Île de la Cité—View of Notre-Dame de Paris (February 26, 1945), 1945, Oil on canvas, 31.5 x 47.2 in (80 x 120 cm), Collection of the Museum Ludwig, Köln © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used with permission.
Biala (1903-200), Le Louvre [CR 753], 1948, Oil on canvas, 36 x 28 1/4 in (91.4 x 71.8 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York.
Biala and her husband Daniel Brustlein boarding French Line’s SS de Grasse for Europe, 1947. Courtesy Tworkov Family Archive, New York.
Picasso, in particular, painted Notre Dame—bending the buildings, the bridges and the river into the Cubist style that he pioneered. This work, Île de la Cité-vue de Notre-Dame de Paris, painted in 1945 after the Second World War, captures Notre Dame in a softer and looser style with muted pastel colors, possibly reflecting a lighter mood of the recently liberated city.
Two years later, in the fall of 1947, Biala would return to Paris aboard French Line’s SS de Grasse—one of the first passenger boats to sail to Europe after the war. Having spent a decade alongside the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford, her return was a joyous one, “I still find in France all the things I’d hoped for. I’d have no use for Paradise if it wasn’t like France.”(1)
Using initially the studio of a new friend, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and much preferring the more “human” aspects of European life, Biala began painting the City of Light from various views and perspectives. “I hadn’t known when I was in New York, that the skyscrapers were weighing on me,” she said in a 1989 interview that featured herself, Shirley Jaffe, and Joan Mitchell. In Paris, she “felt as if they had suddenly fallen off.” For Biala, Paris was “extremely beautiful and paintable.”(2)
Le Louvre, 1948, is one of the first paintings to capture the architecture of her adopted city. This masterwork features a view of the city from the Left Bank looking North across the Seine with views of the 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.
It didn’t take long for the Parisians to take notice of her return. In the summer of 1949, Galerie Jeanne Bucher, held her second solo exhibition in Paris—the first being in 1938 at Galerie Zak. ARTnews championed the work for its depiction of “reflected, part-dream worlds,” and, “her great sensitiveness to color, especially in the handling of yellow,” and her, “interest in peaceful things such as house-fronts, windows, life above street-noises.”(3) Later the same summer Biala became the only American among eighteen candidates selected to participate in the Prix de la Critique, receiving a special honorable mention.
White Façade [CR058], 1948, Oil on canvas, 39 x 32 in (99.1 x 81.3 cm) and Pink Façade [CR 057], 1949, Oil on canvas, 39 x 32 in (99.1 x 81.3 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York
White Façade [CR 058], 1948 and Pink Façade [CR 057], 1949, are examples of the “house-fronts” mentioned in the review and were likely inspired by the apartment building Biala was renting at 52 rue de Bourgogne or a combination of façades the artist remembered from walking the city.
Certainly included in her show at Jeanne Bucher, was Biala’s Chevet de Notre Dame et e Ile St. Louis, 1949. While Picasso and Matisse and other artists preferred the more popular perspective from the West looking East towards Île de la Cité, Biala preferred to capture the cathedral from the East looking West from the Île Saint Louis.
Chevet de Notre Dame et e Île St. Louis [CR 062], 1949, Oil on canvas, 35 x 45 1/2 in (88.9 x 116.8 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York.
Chevet de Notre Dame et e Île St. Louis, is the earliest known painting by Biala of Norte Dame. Its perspective is unique, composed as if on a boat on the Seine or from the Post de la Tourney. The painting looks West towards the cathedral capturing the point where the Seine breaks around the Île de la Cité with Pont de l’Archevêché and the cathedral to the left and the Île Saint Louis to the right. Although a smaller study for this painting exists, it is unlikely that Biala painted this work (or any others) on site en plein air. It is more likely that she painted the work from a sketch or even from memory. It’s a gloomy painting developed around a palette of warm earthy hues of ochre and sage.
It is interesting to note that that summer, Biala met again Matisse spending “2 1/2 hours in his house in the company of a Life photographer who was taking pictures of him.”(4) The next day, she met Picasso again, shaking his hand.
“Paris la nuit [CR 069],” 1957, Oil on canvas, 31 x 58 1/2 in (81.3 x 148.6 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York
Study for “Paris la nuit [CR 413],” c.1957, Graphite on paper, 17 x 22 in (45.7 x 55.9 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York
Paris at night became the subject of two paintings dating from 1954. Similar in composition, one larger than the other, both prominently feature a bridge over the Seine. Among the gesturally painted even impressionistic midnight scene are edges of rooftops and flares of architectural details. A close study of Paris la nuit, 1957, reveals that the bridge featured is Pont du carrousel which was also a favorite of her mentor and friend Edwin Dickinson.
Biala, Notre-Dame I [CR134], 1985, Oil on canvas, 47 x 51 in (119.4 x 132.1 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York
Three decades separate the next series of paintings featuring Notre-Dame. In her studio records, Biala noted four large paintings in a series she completed in 1985, two of which remain with the Estate. In the series, Pont de L’Archevêché appears prominently with the river Seine in the foreground and the towers of the cathedral. In all, the composition and palette remains quite minimal, with the bridge creating an arching horizon. Soft creamy whites and subtle hues of blue make up a consistent palette.
Biala on the left bank of the Seine, Port de Montebello, Paris, June 1979. Courtesy Tworkov Family Archives, New York
“I fell in love with France,” Biala said, “In some ways, it reminded me of the place I was born in. And when I came to France I felt as if I had come home. I smelled the same smells of bread baking and dogs going around in a very busy way, you know, as if they knew what they were about. It really was extraordinarily human.”
A photograph of Biala, taken in the summer of 1979, captures the artist at Port de Montebello at river’s edge, possibly one of the artist’s favorite and most inspiring points in Paris.
_____
1. Letter to Jack Tworkov from 65 Blvd de Clichy, Paris, December 3, 1947.
2. Brenson, Michael. “Three Artists Who Were Warmed by the City of Light.” The New York Times, Sunday, June 25, 1989, 31, 32.
3. Cunard, Nancy. "Janice Biala at Galerie Jeanne Bucher." Art News (July 17, 1949).
4. Letter to Wally Tworkov. July 31, 1949.
FROM THE ARCHIVE: Biala's first major group show in Paris — 90 years ago
Exhibition catalogue: 1940, Parc des Expositions, Porte de Versailles, Paris, January 15–February 1, 1932. Biala’s entry in highlighted text.
90 yrs ago this week: In the first weeks of 1932, Biala was invited to participate in a group exhibition titled “1940” at Parc des Expositions at the Porte de Versailles. This was Biala’s first major group exhibition in Europe and her inclusion signaled her acceptance into the Parisian avant-garde.
Alexander Calder, who had made Paris his home since 1926, was the only other American included. The tone of the exhibition, like so many presented by the Association Artistique, was provoking—wagering on the momentum of hard-core abstraction. In fact, the exhibition included many of the newly founded Abstraction-Création artists, including Piet Mondrian, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and George Vantongerloo. The exhibition also included a major retrospective exhibition of Théo van Doesburgh, who had died the year prior.
The exhibition reverberated across the pond and was all but panned by a critic for The New York Times. The headline read, 1940: Looks Singularly Out of Date:
If the Association Artistique intends that “1940” should represent a future date and that the present work presents a prophecy, they are unaware of the present trend. Many of the exhibitors have contributed compositions of squares and angles and triangles in bright colors that are no doubt the result of speculation and study in the realm of color and form. The present tendency is away from cubes, however. The present seems to be less self-conscious about the human figure and the familiar landscape and less afraid of both. Considering the times and immediate tendencies in art, Biala held true to the themes that would define her career those being the traditional subjects as still-life, portraiture and landscape. In fact the titles of the four paintings: “Le Focher” (The Rock), “Nature Morte” (Still Life), “Tete Verte” (Green Head), “Couleur de Rose” (Color of Pink).
The reviewer singled out Calder and Biala in her review. About Calder, she reported:
Alexander Calder’s metal bar and small wooden balls, a contraption looking as if it might have something to do with television, is called “January 3,” but this writer is too ignorant to appreciate the historical significance of the date.
About Biala she wrote:
Janice Ford Biala is of G. R. D. fame. The things and figures in her painting gravely turn about as if in some slow and harmonious dance of joy. Not a hilarious joy nor a country dance. Something much richer and more contemplative than hilarity.
Receiving news of her mention in the review in the form of a letter from her brother, Jack Tworkov, in true Biala fashion, she penned an aggressive response to the review back to Jack,
The damn poof had to give me the wrong name (I do not sign myself Janice Ford Biala) and what hope is there when someone thinks one paints like a slow dance of joy or some such twoddle.
At the time Biala was splitting her time between two addresses: 32, rue de Vaugirard, Paris and 5 chemin du Petit-Bois, Toulon. In both locales, she was with the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford, who she met on May Day 1930. In her letter to Jack, Biala relayed the challenges she was facing in Paris:
There are few people who think my painting is very good […] but they aren’t people of any importance. Several of them paint themselves and are most uninteresting. I’m frightfully handicapped here for being a woman and a young one at that.
While very little work dating from the time of this exhibition has survived, we know that Biala aligned herself with the modernism being generated by the likes of Picasso and Matisse, after all, it was around this time that Ezra Pound would declare her “rather modern.”
— Jason Andrew for the Estate of Janice Biala, January 2022
________
Download Exhibition Catalogue: Parc des Expositions, Porte de Versailles, Paris, 1940, January 15–February 1, 1932
Download Exhibition Review: Harris, Ruth Green. "'Les Americains' in Paris: Three Large Shows of Expatriate Painters—'1940' Looks Singularly Out of Date." The New York Times, Sunday, February 28, 1932.
FROM THE ARCHIVE: The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape
This virtual event took place on Wednesday, January 6 at 12pm EST
Presented by the Fritz Ascher Society in New York
Lecture by Jason Andrew with Julia K. Gleich
Introduced by Rachel Stern, Exe Dir of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York
Have a question or comment about this lecture?
Supplemental information (click to download):
“Ford Madox Ford and Janice Biala,” by Jason Andrew, PN Review, July-August 2008
This article discussed the first meeting and subsequent life of English novelist Ford Madox Ford and American painter Janice Biala.
“No more Parades End,” by Sara Haslam, Times Literary Supplement, June 2018
This article discusses Ford Madox Ford’s last library and what it tell us about ‘the Tietjens saga.”
About this event:
Biala (1903-2000) was a Polish born American painter whose career stretched over eight decades and spanned two continents. Through it all, she retained an intimacy in her art rooted in Old World Europe—sensibilities that began with memories of her childhood in a Polish village, shaped by School of Paris painters like Bonnard, Matisse and Braque, inspired by Velázquez and the Spanish Masters, and broadened by the community of loft-living artists in Post World War II Downtown New York.
Her arrival in Paris in 1930 from New York City marked the beginning of an extraordinary life: one full of adventure, a passion for literature, and an appetite for art. On that fateful trip she met and fell in love with the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford shared with her all he knew and introduced her to the many artists forging a new Modernism including Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein among others. Biala became Ford’s most fierce advocate remaining devoted to him, at his side, until his death in Deauville, France on June 26, 1939. Biala’s commitment to Ford did not soften at his death.
In this lecture, Jason Andrew shares his research and insight into Biala’s harrowing effort to traveled back to the South of France, which was in Mussolini’s crosshairs, to make the daring rescue of Ford’s manuscripts and library, just as war would consume all of Europe. Joining Andrew in this presentation is choreographer Julia K. Gleich, who will bring voice to the letters of Janice Biala.
Virtual Event (Jan 6): Biala: The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape
Biala (1903-2000) “June Femme,” c.1933, Oil on panel, 25 1/2 x 21 1/4 in (66 x 55.9 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala © Estate of Janice Biala / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
January 6, 2021 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Free
Lecture by
Jason Andrew, Independent Scholar, Curator and Producer in New York
with
Julia Gleich, Choreographer
Introduced by
Rachel Stern, Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York
Biala (1903-2000) was a Polish born American painter whose career stretched over eight decades and spanned two continents. Through it all, she retained an intimacy in her art rooted in Old World Europe—sensibilities that began with memories of her childhood in a Polish village, shaped by School of Paris painters like Bonnard, Matisse and Braque, inspired by Velázquez and the Spanish Masters, and broadened by the community of loft-living artists in Post World War II Downtown New York.
Her arrival in Paris in 1930 from New York City marked the beginning of an extraordinary transatlantic life: one full of adventure, a passion for literature, and an appetite for art. On that fateful trip she met and fell in love with the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford shared with her all he knew and introduced her to the many artists forging a new Modernism including Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein among others. Biala became Ford’s most fierce advocate remaining devoted to him, at his side, until his death in Deauville, France on June 26, 1939.
Biala’s commitment to Ford did not soften at his death. In this lecture, Jason Andrew shares his research and insight into Biala’s harrowing effort to traveled back to the South of France, which was in Mussolini’s cross-hairs, to make the daring rescue of Ford’s manuscripts and library, just as war would consume all of Europe. Joining Andrew in this presentation is choreographer Julia K. Gleich, who will bring voice to the letters of Janice Biala.
Jason Andrew
is an independent scholar, curator, and producer. He is the founding partner at Artist Estate Studio LLC, the entity that represents the estates of Jack Tworkov, Janice Biala, and Elizabeth Murray among others. He has written, lectured, and curated extensively on the life and art of Janice Biala and her contemporaries including a retrospective of the artist’s work at Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2018, as an exhibition focused on Biala’s work 1952-1962 on view at McCormick Gallery, Chicago through January 2021.
Julia K Gleich
is a choreographer, teacher, scholar and mathematics aficionado with an MA from the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA from the University of Utah. In 2004, Julia Gleich, in partnership with Jason Andrew, founded Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts with a mission to renew and refresh the exchange within the interdisciplinary arts. She then became a partner in Artist Estate Studio, LLC. Ms. Gleich is the founder and Artistic Director of Gleich Dances, which has received critical notice in The New York Times, DanceInforma, DanceInsider, Village Voice, The New Criterion, The Brooklyn Rail, among others.
The event is part of the monthly series: Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression, which is generously sponsored by Allianz Partners. Future events and the recordings of past events can be found HERE.
Now Available: Biala: Intimacy & Exile (catalogue)
$20
Published on the occasion of Biala: Intimacy & Exile: paintings 1952-1962
Organized in collaboration with the Estate of Janice Biala at McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL, November 7, 2020-January 9, 2021
Essay by Jason Andrew
Design by Thomas McCormick with Arno Pro typeface
Published by McCormick Gallery, LLC, and TMG Projects
Printed by Permanent Printing, Ltd.
32 pages, softcover, color
11 x 8.5 inches / 28 x 21.6 cm
Exhibition News: Biala opens at McCormick Gallery, Chicago
Biala (1903-2000) “White Interior with Black Kettle,” 1961, Oil on canvas, 76 ¾ x 51 in. (194.9 x 132.1 cm) CR 038 / Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York
Biala: Intimacy & Exile / Paintings 1952-1962
November 7, 2020-January 9, 2021
McCormick Gallery
835 West Washington Blvd., Chicago, IL, 60607
www.thomasmccormick.com
a fully illustrated catalogue is available here
Chicago, IL—McCormick Gallery in collaboration with the Estate of Janice Biala is pleased to present the exhibition Biala: Intimacy & Exile / Paintings 1952-1962. An important figure of historic scale, the painter known simply as Biala had a career that stretched over eight decades and was heralded from Paris to New York. On view are paintings defined by a decade where the artist expanded upon her established style inspired by School of Paris painters like Bonnard, Matisse and Braque, and broadened by the community of loft-living artists in downtown New York that included Willem de Kooning. Critic Michael Brenson aptly described her as “a blend of intimacy and exile.”
Janice Biala was born Schenehaia Tworkovsky in 1903 in a small village tucked alongside the River Biala in what is now southeast Poland. She immigrated to New York with her older brother Yakov in 1913. Yakov would later become the painter Jack Tworkov, a founding member of the New York School.
In the early 1920s, Biala hitchhiked her way to Provincetown, MA, to study with the painter Edwin Dickinson. As she established herself in New York, she changed her name at the suggestion of William Zorach from Janice Tworkov to simply Biala. On a fateful trip to Paris in 1930, she met and fell in love with the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford. Through Ford, Biala became enmeshed with many of the artists forging a new Modernism including the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the painter Henri Matisse, and writer Gertude Stein. Biala began exhibiting her work in Paris as early as 1938 making her one of the earliest Americans in Paris. Upon Ford’s death in 1939, Biala returned to New York and established herself among a rising generation of artists defining themselves as the New York School.
“Biala chose subject matter over brute expression,” writes Jason Andrew, curator and director of the Estate of Janice Biala, in his essay accompanying the exhibition, “Her paintings derive from the time-honored triumvirate of still-life, landscape, and portraiture, and yet she approached these themes through an uncommon significance defined by a painterliness of gesture, color, and calculated rhythm.”
The exhibition features signature examples of Biala’s unique assimilation of color and compositions defined by the School of Paris with the gestural expressionism associated with Abstract Expressionism. Many works are on view for the first time.
The work of Biala can be found in major museums world-wide including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, The Carnegie Art Museum, Pittsburgh, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Princeton University Museum, Princeton, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY among others. And in Europe: Museé de Grenoble, Grenoble, Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Estate of Janice Biala, New York, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essay by Jason Andrew.
Event (Nov 20): Biala + Edith: an evening of the art and letters at the Art Students League
Biala (1903-2000) in her courtyard, Paris, c. 1965. Photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson © Henri Carier-Bresson/Magnum Photos. Edith Schloss (1919-2011) at the Caffè Novecento, Rome, 2008. Photo: Sylvia Stucky
Biala + Edith: an evening of their art and letters
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
6:00pm
Art Students League
215 W 57th Street
NYC
_____
Biala + Edith were internationally recognized for their art and historically respected for their often vocal opinions of the art world and the players who swayed influence. Both lived strikingly independent lives and this independence was reflected in their art, which in both cases assimilated Abstract Expressionism—the movement in which both artists were deeply enmeshed. Both artists attended the Art Students League: Biala in 1923 and Edith in 1942
This special evening will feature readings of letters from the archive of each artist selected by Jason Andrew, Director of the Estates of Biala and Edith Schloss, an a illustrated purview of their work. The charismatic character of both artists will be brought to life through the reading of the letters choreographer Julia K. Gleich.
Biala (1903-2000) was recognized in France and the United States for her paintings of intimate interiors, portraits, and the many places she traveled. A Polish émigré, Biala was born Schenehaia Tworkovska in a small village of Biala in 1903. She immigrated to New York with her older brother and both would soon become active in the early avant grade artist communities of Greenwich Village and Provincetown—Biala taking the name of her native town and Jack becoming a founding member of The Club. On a fateful trip to Paris in 1930, she met the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford. He would introduce her to everyone he knew including Gertude Stein, Picasso, and Matisse among others. She remained at his side until his death in 1939. Upon her return to New York, she quickly became a leading artist in Postwar America befriending Willem de Kooning. She would continue to divide her time, living and exhibiting between New York and Paris until her death in 2000.
Edith Schloss (1919-2011) was one of America’s great expatriate artists intrinsically linked to the milieu of postwar American art whose paintings, assemblages, collages, watercolors and drawings border on the bittersweet, fragile, intimate and naive. Born in Offenbach, Germany, Edith arrived in New York in 1942. She met the socialist Heinz Langerhans who introduced her to Fairfield Porter and Bertolt Brecht and through Porter she met Willem de Kooning, Edwin Denby, and Rudy Burckhardt (who she would marry in 1946). From the onset of the 1950s Schloss exhibited regularly in galleries lining 10th Street and summered in Maine where she befriended Alex Katz and Lois Dodd among others. Separating from Rudy, she left for Rome in 1962 with her young son with plans to stay for only three months; she stayed for a lifetime. Painter Cy Twombly and experimental musician Alvin Curran became her closest friends. An avid writer, she was a critic for The International Herald Tribune and feature art critic for Wanted in Rome. She passed away in 2011 on the eve of the opening of her exhibition, The Painted Song: new works by Edith Schloss and musical score by Alvin Curran.
Exhibition News: Biala featured in "Post-War Women" at ASL
Biala (1903-2000) The Bull, 1956, Oil on canvas, 43 x 54 ¾ in. (109.2 x 139.1 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York
Post-War Women
curated by Will Corwin
November 2–December 1, 2019
Art Students League: The Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery
215 W 57th Street
NYC
__________
In New York, Post-War Women is The Art Students League’s first exhibition to explore the vital contributions of alumnae on the international stage. On view at The Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery from November 2 to December 1, 2019, Post-War Women challenges the misperception that great art produced by women artists is somehow an exception rather than the rule.
Curator Will Corwin investigates the history of innovative art academies like The League that promoted democratic ideologies, which in turn created artistic opportunities for women of all social classes. This ground-breaking exhibition features over forty artists active between 1945-65, tracing the complex networks these professional women formed to support one another and their newfound access to art education.
Post-War Women presents work by some of the prominent artists of the 20th Century like Louise Bourgeois and Helen Frankenthaler, but more importantly it calls out the women who were not credited enough: Mavis Pusey, Kazuko Miyamoto, Olga Albizu and Helena Vieira da Silva – challenging a new generation of visitors and art students to KNOW YOUR FOREMOTHERS.
Featured Artists:
Mary Abbott
Berenice Abbott
Olga Albizu
Janice Biala
Isabel Bishop
Nell Blaine
Regina Bogat
Louise Bourgeois
Vivian Browne
Elizabeth Catlett
Elaine De Kooning
Dorothy Dehner
Monir Farmanfarmaian
Helen Frankenthaler
Perle Fine
Judith Godwin
Terry Haass
Grace Hartigan
Carmen Herrera
Eva Hesse
Faith Hubley
Lenore Jaffee
Gwendolyn Knight
Lee Krasner
Blanche Lazzell
Marguerite Louppe
Lenita Manry
Marisol
Mercedes Matter
Kazuko Miyamoto
Louise Nevelson
Charlotte Park
Joyce Pensato
Irene Rice Pereira
Mavis Pusey
Faith Ringgold
Edith Schloss
May Stevens
Yvonne Thomas
Maria Viera da Silva
Lynn Umlauf
Merrill Wagner
Joyce Weinstein
Michael West
Exhibition News: Biala opens at PAAM (Provincetown)
Opening reception: Friday, August 10, 8pm
Provincetown Art Association and Museum presents Biala: Provincetown Summers: selected paintings and drawings. This historic exhibition is the first to focus entirely on the paintings and drawings by Janice Biala (1903-2000), which were created or inspired by her summers in Provincetown and on Cape Cod. The exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, August 10 at 8pm and will run through September 30 at Provincetown Art Association and Museum (460 Commercial Street, Provincetown, 508.487.1750 ext.17 / www.paam.org)
Organized and curated by Jason Andrew, the exhibition features twenty-seven paintings and twenty-three works on paper ranging in date from 1924 to 1985. Highlights include the earliest painting by the artist titled The Violin (c.1923-23) painted as an homage to her mentor and friend, Edwin Dickinson; Portrait of a Writer (Ford Madox Ford) (1938), who she met in 1930 and remained at his side until his death in 1939; The Beach (1958), a masterwork from the artist's most gestural period; a group of whimsical drawings of her grandnephew's first steps in Provincetown Bay; and Pilgrim Lake (1985), a pensive and contemplative painting that sublimely captures a layering of water, dunes, and the sky above. Works are on loan from the Estate of Janice Biala (courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York), as well as several major loans from private collections, The Art Collection of the Town of Provincetown, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
Mr. Andrew will give a gallery talk on Tuesday, August 21 at 6pm as part of the Fredi Schiff Levin Lectures.
An online catalogue with essay by curator Jason Andrew is available here by visiting www.janicebiala.org
“I envy you going to Provincetown for the summer.
If only I had two lives—I’d spend one by the sea and the other traveling the world.”
These were the words of an artist who, at the time of this declaration, had already lived two lives: one, painting in France during the 1930s with her companion the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, and the second, as one of only a few women to gain critical acclaim during the male dominated era of New York School of Abstract Expressionism.
Biala (1903-2000) was a feisty and articulate painter whose career spanned eight decades and two art capitals: New York City and Paris. A Polish èmigrèe, born Schenehaia Tworkovska in 1903, she arrived in New York from her native Biala in 1913 with her older brother Jacob (who would later become the noted Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov). Opinionated and tough, the young brunette with a soft Eastern European face was a free thinker of the highest order. She had a passion for life that fueled a rather aggressive social independence. She was a true bohemian.
Provincetown loomed large in the life of both Biala and Tworkov having first hitchhiked their way to study with Charles Hawthorne in the summer of 1923. However, their intellectual attraction toward modernism had them rebelling against Hawthorne’s ridged traditional plein air approach. While Jack sought out the artist Karl Knaths, Biala sought out another highly respected and revered painter, Edwin Dickinson. It was through Dickinson that she received her earliest and most informed art training. Because of Dickinson, Biala said, she “found her true way.”
Although that first year spent in Provincetown would be the only time Biala would reside on the Cape with any duration, it would prove to be most critical in defining her path and sensibility. It was soon thereafter at the suggestion of William Zorach that she changed her name. “I decided to change my name,” she wrote, “My name is now Biala.”
The Cape was the place Biala returned to after a decade in France during the 1930s at the side of the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford told Ezra Pound that Biala was “rather modern,” and introduced her to all the artists working at the cutting edge of modernism including Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Searching for a place to heal following Ford’s death and her heroic escape from the growing threat of Hitler’s regime, Biala spent the summer of 1940 with the Dickinsons in Truro. It was there that she plotted to re-establish herself in America while vowing to return to France.
Biala believed that “all art is sensual before it is anything else. The art of painting is for the eye first and last..." It was this statement that set her apart during the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Although she counted among her closest friends Willem de Kooning, she never fully embraced pure abstraction, as the attention to subject was paramount in her work.
She exhibited extensively in the leading galleries of New York and Paris, and following the end of World War II, she boarded one of the first passenger boats to France in 1947. Despite the bond she had with Paris she never felt bound by ties of nationality. “I always had the feeling that I belong where my easel is,” Biala said, “I never have the feeling of nationality or roots. In the first place, I’m an uprooted person. I’m Jewish. I was born in a country where it was better not to be Jewish. Wherever you go, you’re in a sense a foreigner. I always felt that wherever my easel was, that was my nationality.”
As she settled into her full life in Paris, Biala became the person every American artist in France would come to see. These included Norman Blum, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Bill Jenkins, Milton Resnick, critic Harold Rosenberg and the occasional run in with Joan Mitchell. And though the sea and the dunes of Provincetown and the Cape may have been miles away, they were only a step and a brush away when she was in her studio.
Biala’s paintings retained an intimacy rooted in the Old World. A sensibility that began with memories of her childhood in a Polish village, broadened by the community of immigrant artists that she discovered in downtown New York, focused by the very delicate hand of Edwin Dickinson, and lastly shaped by a calculated assimilation of French painters like Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and George Braque.
Provincetown and the Cape were an enduring source of inspiration as the sea and the dunes were among her favorite subjects, which included the bridges and architecture of Paris, the canals and facades of Venice, and the bullfights of Spain.
And so she returned at intervals to traditional themes of interiors, still-life, portraiture and landscape but did so with abstract flare, and directness. As critic Michael Brenson noted Biala was “a blend of intimacy and exile."
An online catalogue with essay by curator Jason Andrew is available here or by visiting www.janicebiala.org