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 The headline read, 1940: Looks Singularly Out of Date: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
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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.
