Isabel Bishop (1902-1988): “And that was my first walking picture”

People Walking (Union Square)

Elizabeth Bennet reading a letter from Jane (one of a series of illustrations for an edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice)

Without my conscious knowledge, somewhere along the line I had become committed. This commitment to being an artist had, I realized, come on me even without my being aware of it … then I realized that, no matter how awful I felt about everything I had done to that point, the decision was made . I was prepared to do anything to keep myself painting. Anything (1977, Isobel Bishop, cited in Munro)

Dear readers and friends,

Of course when I realized that one of my favorite line drawings of Elizabeth Bennet reading a letter from Jane was by Isabel Bishop and intended for a 1976 edition of Pride and Prejudice, that confirmed that I must write about her for my mid-century woman artist. A New York artist of mid-century, who did most of her work from a studio looking down on fourteenth street. She did drawings, highly original prints, illustrations, one still well-known painting and one mural:

While Isobel Bishop appears in a brief biographical sketch with accompanying single reproduction in three of my survey books (Elsa Honig Fine, Women in Art; Nancy Heller, Women Artists, and Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists, 1550-1950), and there is indeed an excellent on-line blog by Victoria Meyers (so open to the public), “hellomargot” on Bishop. Meyers includes an accurate balanced survey of the kind of pictures she produced, a summary of her schooling, where she resided while painting — for 44 years in a studio on the northwest Corner of Union Square, NYC (1930s-70s); her several prestigious and serious art positions in American art institutions, plus an exact list of precisely described characteristics of her art, yet it is true enough for me to suggest with Paul von Blum that she is one of several women artists of the mid-20th century largely ignored by mainstream critics who produced socially conscious art, which “shed enormous if disconcerting light on the precariousness of existence in a technological world beset with overwhelming social, economic and environmental problems” (New Visions, New Viewers, New Vehicles: Twentieth-Century Developments in North American Political Art,” Leonardo, 26:5, Art and Social Consciousness: Special Issue, (1993):459-466.

Greer’s book (and four other of my major surveys) doesn’t mention her, though Bishop endured the same obstacle race as Greer’s other women, in 1934 marrying an eminent neurologist (who made good money) and conservative episcopalian, Harold B. Wolff, producing one son, so that her life’s routine began with her daily commute from Riverdale, a very nice area of the North Bronx to Union Square. She is not of interest to Borzello though she created self-images. This small one alludes to 17th century pictures:

The focus of many surveys is still Eurocentric and this may account for her absence and/or brief presence in several accounts, but her once best known works include a mural with a “world literature” center:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray …. (from Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of the Inferno)

O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street
The pleasant whining of a mandoline … (T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland)

Dante [and Virgil] in Union Square;

Much of her work looks like images of mostly or centrally women out famous European and American films:

Two Women Among Men,

and allude to previous famous male artists, like Degas:

Daumier:

Two of Us

Nochlin and Sutherland Harris say that Bishop combined the grand manner with contemporary urban subjects in the manner of Reginald Marsh. She of course did not omit the required or once obligatory classical nude as formulated by Kenneth Clark, for which she won her first official prize (now duly at the Whitney Museum of Art):

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Nude (1934) — as a subject she is said to have found the nude fascinating for a woman to draw (there is a Nude by a Stream, and A Nude Bending)

It may be the very socially and politically committed nature of her leftist art: she belongs to the worlds of Diego Rivera (muralist), Dorothea Lange (photographer), Herbert Block (cartoonists), Alice Neel, who painted her in an image playfully imitating Bishop’s typical kind of image:

Alice Neel: Isobel Bishop

Isabel Bishop: Departure

and to cite the other women: Nancy Spero, May Stevens, Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago, more recently Margaret Lazzari, Judy Baca, and closely contemporary American, Louise Bourgeois, Jeanne Reynal, Alma M. Thomas.

Probably it’s more the her de-emphasis on conventional large-scale finished oil painting, of which I could find only one:

Bootblack (1942)

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Photo of Bishop working in her fourteenth street studio

The longest most satisfying treatment is found in Eleanor Munro’s Original: American Women Artists (145-152), and what comes across, rather surprisingly, given her elite education and successes, is self-deprecation, self-dismissal or marginalizing words of a kind found in Paula Modersohn-Beck and Marianne Werefkin:

Of her childhood and family time: she was the youngest of five children, two sets of twins before her: “infant impressions come back in time to haunt” (Munro, 147): her father was a teacher of classics in a school he founded in Princeton, New Jersey before moving to Cincinnati (where Isobel was born), then to Detroit, where he was a principal in private schools

“They would go off here and there. Whichever was at home would take an interest in me, decide what kind of person I should be, what I should wear, and then go off again. One sister had me in Eton collars and tunics. Then another came and said, ‘Oh, those terrible dull clothes!’ and put me in fancy things. Everyone was trying to do something to me, except my mother. She was quite indifferent.” (Munro, 147)

Munro says her parents were “poor;” after Detroit, the father “returned as putative dean of faculty to a boys’ military academy in Peekskill, New York, where his learning was barely appreciated. His plight touched his daughter, but she was relieved of having to experience it firsthand by being sent off to New York-thanks to a [wealthy] cousin-to study art.

“The only thing I had any aptitude for was drawing. I’d been at Saturday classes in Detroit, where the teacher was so radical as to have even young children drawing from life. When I was twelve, walking in for the first time to find a great fat nude woman posing was something of a shock! But at least by the time I got to New York I felt I had been initiated.
    I was sent to the New York School of Applied Design for Women [where she was to learn the art of book illustration to be self-supporting], and I convinced the school that I was already an experienced student. So I went immediately into the life class. This was 1918. In November, we students marched, in our smocks, in the Armistice Day Parade. The Armory Show had been a long time before, in 1913. But the end of the war triggered a renewal of the excitement of it. I felt the excitement, remote as I was. And so I began learning about modern art.”(147)

At the Art League, Isobel was inspired by the artists and patrons she met: Katherine Dreier. She left for the Art Students League in NYC and met and impressed and was soon encouraged and mentored by Kenneth Hayes Miller (he had work in the Armory Show), Guy Pene du Bois where she learned European techniques (imitating the “old masters”). For a while she lived with “provincial well-bred art and music students,” chaperoned properly, but then left for the Village and her own place to work alone. She writes about this period of struggle and depression thus:

“And then I began having a terribly hard time.
    “I was only in my early twenties, and, working by myself, I got into a bad state. I couldn’t manage it as a person, I see now, and I drifted into an extreme depression, stayed up all night, couldn’t do anything all day. “Then, just at that point, Miller offered an ‘Advanced Composition Class’ back at the League, and I went and enrolled in it, to make my life livable again. And in fact taking that course did give my life a structure again by allowing or obliging me to work alongside my peers. So I stayed with that class for another two years.
    “And then I had another severe jolt. I woke up to realize that I had misinterpreted Miller’s teaching. That I had been trying very hard in a completely wrong direction! Working all by myself, in my isolation, I had lost my nerve as an artist; coming back to the class, I had thought that by following Miller’s methods I would arrive, again, at a point of confidence. But that hadn’t happened.
    “The School of Paris was dominant at that time in the ’20s among all the more interesting artists. But Miller took the exact opposite direction. I thought he was teaching that as long as you used a rational method, rendered figures solidly and firmly in formal relationships, the works would have meaning. But they had no meaning, no personal expression! I had lost track entirely of the idea that to be an artist is to say something for oneself. It was du Bois who opened my eyes. He came into my studio for the first time in a couple of years and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And the moment he said that, I realized my error. I felt those years had been a mistake.
“In 1975, cleaning out my studio, I found some of those pictures. When I looked at them, I saw they were so terrible! I had to take an ax to them! Literally-physically; they were on gesso panels and so tough I had to break them up with an ax.(150-151)

Recess

She found herself when she moved to fourteenth street. She was comfortable among the people in the street, working women, immigrants, unemployed afternoon or homeless and sometimes violent men (whom she calls bums and invited upstairs). She loved the city, its buildings, the perspectives, vistas, the detritus of commerce overlaying everything

“I’d come into the Miller class in the next wave after Alexander Brook, Kuniyoshi, Peggy Bacon, Katherine Schmidt. There are classes where a number become known and classes where no one does, and not much mixing between them. The group about four years older than I had a lively time. They went bowling at Teutonia Hall Tuesdays and did many social things together. I envied them, but I wasn’t part of that group. In fact, I had no artist friends. No art life. Eventually, however, the Whitney Studio Club run by Gertrude Whitney was a resource. Du Bois recommended me, I became a member and showed my still lifes there. A lovely place to go. Aside from that, I just went on working in my studio on Fourteenth Street …”
    “As time went on, I began spending more and more time down in the square sketching. I’d been abroad (my cousin again, bless him) to see the museums. I remembered sitting in the Green Park in Antwerp with my pen and sketchbook. When I came back to Union Square, the difference in the people on the benches from those in Holland fascinated me. It was the first time I registered the particularity of what I was looking at, the genre aspect of the scene. For example, after seeing a certain sleeping bum a number of times, I took courage, waited till he woke and then approached him and explained I would like him to pose. He asked whether I wanted him to take his clothes off. I assured him not. In the end, he came to the studio, more frightened then I was, and returned many times. A dreadful man. He once threw an easel through the window. Then Raphael Soyer got hold of an older man and persuaded him to pose and he did so for everyone. That made my bum furious and he beat up the other man in the Bowery. In the end, these subjects made a whole epoch for me-my interest in these people. They had for me what I had been seeking: subjective reality.” (151)

Then came the recognition, marriage, all the years of professional appointments (see Victoria Meyers); many exhibitions of her art from the 1930s on, including at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, the 1939 World’s Fair, the Corcoran Biennial in Washington DC; one women exhibitions too (Midtown galleries, NY, New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, even a retrospective in 1974 at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson).

Yet she will still write: “No, I don’t think all artists have so much trouble. There are others so fecund, able, prolific. I know they do not succeed altogether without struggle, but there are some who have a most enviable genius.
    “My ability is so small! And yet the pursuit never stops engrossing me entirely.” (153)

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Munro sees the basis of Bishop’s art as the same as Goethe’s (who wrote theoretically): “Images originaTe when light falls on dark edges; light must somewhere strike edges hat make it visible.” Bishop was never of the school of abstract expressionism but wanted to handle “pure light” and “pure color”, figures, the human body as it cuts along the light. She sees people as “insubstantial” while “real” (145).

At the Noon Hour

She specialized in etching and sought “irredescence and transparency” using 8 coats of gesso to a “masonite panel,” grounds of loose uneven gray stripes composed of gelatin, powdered charcoal and white lead to create a surface that will give a sense of vibration:” “Color is not an original motif for me. My fundamentals are form, space and light” (quoted in Honig, 207):

Campus students (1972) — look at our they are dressed, what they carry

But Bishop’s subject matter, how she treats working women, the tone of the picture, her stances towards them are what impresses us and counts for her. A favorite motif is of people reading, close up, interacting intimately and intensely:

Reading [a letter or some written communication] and concerned over it

[Learning to] Read … Together

She is rebelling against class hierarchy, against the predominance of images of women based on “air-brushing,” fanatical dieting, cosmetic surgery, gentility: Bishop’s women eat ice cream during their

Lunch Break

Genuine self-gratification in putting vulgar make-up on (this is no classical image of Vanity but of strong good large teeth):

Come up close, and they have chubby faces and look sad:

She debunks too:

Lunch counter

According to Honig (206), Bishop identifies a contemporary living art with movement: she seeks to capture figures “in motion — dressing, reaching, bending, pulling” (207). Honig denies there is any protest meaning in Bishop’s art; her “derelicts” (what language) and working people “do not appeal to the sympathy;” we see them in “small moments of triumph.” Really?

Is not this a grim Madonna (no false worship, no mystification, no bland serenity here]:

Waiting with her child

Even her illustrations for Pride and Prejudice present the figures as aggressive people:

We are to feel sorry for Mary: any minute now she will be told “she has pleased us long enough:”

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As Nochlin and Harris Sutherland say, Isobel Bishop is a New York artist (325); her subjects and world are creatures of the city on multilayered kind of friezes, so the fleeting moment may feel monumental: what no one says is the look of her people is that of a 1940s movie:

— ice cream is one of life’s treats, compensations …

Before and while married she made money from the Roosevelt era federal art projects, and I’m tempted to end this sketch with a New York City 1930s sort of poem.

Apartments on First Avenue

By Cynthia Macdonald

Cemeteries are becoming so crowded in the New York area
a conglomerate has filed plans to construct a block-square
above-ground facility.”
— WYNC News broadcast

Underground space, like water, is running out
So they are building apartment houses for the dead.
That ad: “Keep your loved ones safe from seepage,” is
Obsolete; these marble skyscrapers have
No cracks and point in the right direction.
Here, where the municipal station tolls the hour with
“This is New York where more than eight million people
Live and work and enjoy the fruits of democracy,”
The question now becomes where can you afford
To live and where to live and die?

Persephone, her lips stained with pomegranate juice,
Runs in her shift (it is 8-4) through the hall.
The seeds from that seedy red globe litter;
They cannot root in marble fields. She plays
Her lyre and the single strand of plaint
Turns polyphonous, echo’s counterpoint off
Blue-veined cleavage. Here in the clouds, strains
Of the lyre suffuse the thin air, using it up.
But Zeus, her father, angry at the music of women,
Tells her to go to Hades again even though
The bright stamens of her hair make him want to
Stroke it. She resists his direction. Lightning bolts.
o Lord, the hardness of this place.
She takes the elevator down, abasing herself.

O Lord, the hardness of this place.
Galleries fitted to entomb feeling and bodies,
Sky catacombs where love’s declensions stiffen into
Fixity. But I play my lyre and it tells the truth.
Gluck’s single strand of happiness resounds.
If you, walking ahead, searching for a bridge to
That most circular of Museums, turn and
Look at me too long, we may both become marble-
Statues for our funerary niche-but we must risk it.
Pluto, Zeus, our parents, the archangel Michael,
Mayor Koch: to Hell with them. Or not.
You reach out your hand and turn. Pulses deny marble.
The ignited fires have no lick of burning.
Defying the Storm King Power Co., we walk out into
The light fantastic, trip the sidewalks. Within our
Bodies’ compass there is no need to fight gravity. (from Howard Moss, ed. New York Poems)

But Bishop is said to have kept on her wall a piece of paper with these lines by Henry James:

    We work in the dark.
We do what we can – We give what we have.
Our doubt is our passion, and our passion our task.
    The rest is the madness of art (Munro, 146)

A photo of Bishop, n.d.