Isabel Bishop

In 1920, while a young woman beginning her schooling as a painter at the Art Students League in New York, Isabel Bishop was confronted with a decision: work with teachers then exploring modernist abstraction or with those who remained committed to realism. (1) Bishop chose the realists and set the course of her career in motion.

Born in Cincinnati, she grew up in Detroit the youngest of five children. Graduating high school at age fifteen, she traveled to New York to train as a commercial artist at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. After two years there, she decided to study the fine arts with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Guy Pène du Bois at the Art Students League, completing her studies there in 1924. It was from Miller that she absorbed the painting techniques of Renaissance and Baroque artists and the centrality of the human figure in depictions of contemporary life.

She moved into her first studio, at Fourteenth Street and Union Square, in lower Manhattan, in 1926 and maintained a space there until 1984, commuting daily after her marriage in 1934 to a neurologist and subsequent move to Riverdale, in the Bronx. The people she observed daily in the square formed the basis for her art, especially the female office workers talking and laughing, hurrying to work or the subway, lingering over ice cream during lunch hour. Critical acclaim came in the 1930s with the exhibition of these pictures. During that decade she was known as one of the urban realists of the Fourteenth Street School along with Miller, Reginald Marsh, and the Soyer brothers. Intensely supportive of one another, Bishop, Miller, and Marsh traveled to Europe to study the Old Masters in 1931.

Human figures are the essential facts of her work-women, children, and men she observed in the city or models who posed for her in the studio. She worked primarily in oil but is known for her drawings and etchings as well. By the end of her life she had received numerous honorary doctorates, including a presidential award for Outstanding Achievements in the Arts (1979), and had come to be considered one of the most important twentieth-century American realists.

NOTES:

1. Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982), pp. 227-28.

2. Quoted in Isabelle Dervaux, "Enter the Women: A Slow Transformation at the Academy from the 1930s to Today," in David Dearinger and Isabelle Dervaux, Challenging Tradition: Women of the Academy, 1826-2003 (New York: National Academy of Design, 2003), p. 24.