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 The headline read, 1940: Looks Singularly Out of Date: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.
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
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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
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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
Exhibition News: Pavel Zoubok Gallery presents collages by Biala
Biala, Table Chargee (fond fonce a droite), 1963, collage, pencil, oil on canvas, 51 1/2 x 45 inches
Pavel Zoubok Gallery is delighted to be exhibiting once again at The Art Show (ADAA) in the Park Avenue Armory. To mark the 30th Anniversary of this prestigious fair, we will be featuring important works by the Polish-born American painter and collagist, JANICE BIALA (1903-2000).
Please visit Booth D10 from Wednesday, February 28 – Sunday, March 4, 2018.
This solo booth will feature a select group of key works from the 1950s and 1960s, making a compelling case for Biala’s inclusion in the pantheon of postwar abstractionists working in collage. Critic Mario Naves writes:
The tension between pure abstraction and the everyday accrues most bluntly in Biala’s collages. Forget Kurt Schwitter’s loving accumulations of detritus or Max Ernst’s adroitly choreographed absurdities—a Biala collage…storms with impatience; scraps of paper, roughly geometric in form, align along a barely discernible grid…The collages aren’t strictly representational, but the specificity of motif is felt as underlying structure—Biala captures its heft and integrity, albeit in abbreviated or obscured manner.
Janice Biala’s work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally during her lifetime with seven solo shows at the storied Stable Gallery and in five Whitney Museum Annuals. Her works are in private and public collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the Whitney Museum of America Art, New York, The Pittsburgh Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., The National Museum, Oslo, Norway, Musée Cantonal de Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland and Musée National d’Arts Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
To preview works and for additional information please contact Kris Nuzzi at kris@pavelzoubok.com.
Exhibition News: Biala at Tibor de Nagy Gallery
Biala, “Horse and Carriage,” c. 1983, oil and collage on canvas, 45 x 58 in. (115.2 x 148.4 cm) Harvey and Phyllis Lichtenstein Collection
Tibor de Nagy Gallery presents its fifth exhibition of paintings by Biala (1903-2000), featuring over twenty works from the 1960s through the 1990s including selected works from the Harvey and Phyllis Lichtenstein Collection. Harvey Lichtenstein was an ardent supporter of new talent and the President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music from 1967-1999. The exhibition will run January 6-February 11, 2018.
Biala’s contribution to modernism has been noted by critics who championed her assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Her eight-decade career began in the early 1920s when she hitch-hiked with her brother Jack Tworkov to study art in Provincetown. A fateful Paris encounter with English novelist Ford Madox Ford led to a ten-year relationship with the writer and a life-long relationship with France. Upon her return to New York in 1939 following Ford’s death, Biala was in the thick of a milieu of the New York School, befriending painter Willem de Kooning, and critic Harold Rosenberg among many others. Biala thrived on her transatlantic life maintaining a studio in America while returning time after time to her beloved Paris.
Biala’s approach was a synthesis which danced on the lines between representation and abstraction materializing in a uniquely personal style. Intimate interiors, subtle still-lifes, portraits, and long views of the many landscapes of her various travels acted as her creative point of departure. These initial subjects characterized components of Modernist French styles such as Intimism and were translated through the gestural strokes of Abstract Expressionism which epitomized her mature aesthetic.
In addition to celebrating her undefinable painterly uniqueness, this exhibition highlights the extraordinary relationship Biala had with the director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Lichtenstein and his wife Phyllis. Biala and Harvey were related through marriage (Biala’s sister-in-law was Harvey’s first cousin). The Lichtenstein Collection includes emblematic examples from important themes of Biala’s career, as well as a cohesive representation of the significant places the artist featured in her paintings: France, Italy, and especially Spain.
Harvey Litchenstein (seated far right) with the first artists of the New Wave Festival, BAM, 1997 (Front row from left: Jene Highstein, Kristin Jones, Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris. Back row includes Andrew Ginzel, JoAnne Akalaitis (third from left), Bill T. Jones, Lou Reed, Ping Chong and Pina Bausch (third from right) among others. Photo: Joanne Savio for The New York Times
About Harvey and Phyllis Lichtenstein
As one of the foremost theatrical producers of his time, Harvey Lichtenstein’s first Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) season included Alban Berg’s atonal opera Lulu; performances by a number of modern-dance troupes — Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham and Alwin Nikolais, among others; and the Living Theater’s evening of political protest, Paradise Now. He went on to start the Next Wave Festival where he presented important artists such as Robert Wilson and Pina Bausch. This exhibition aims to not only highlight the collection, but celebrate the Lichtensteins’ eye for talent and close relationships with visual artists.
Harvey and Phyllis not only loved the theater, but also the visual arts and amassed a small but important collection that solely included Daniel Brustlein (1904-1996), Jack Tworkov (1900-1982), and Biala (1903-2000). One historic note, for her 80th birthday Biala had one wish and it was to spend it in Seville, her favorite city in Spain. Family and friends gathered to join her there including Harvey and Phyllis. The group took a horse and carriage ride around the plaza at La Giralda. So memorable was the experience for Biala, she preserved it in the painting Horse and Carriage which would become part of the Harvey and Phyllis Lichtenstein Collection and is featured in this exhibition.
Lecture: Biala: The Woman Painter Among Men
^ Photo: Rudy Burckhardt, 1956
Biala: The Woman Painter Among Men
a special evening with curator Jason Andrew
Thurs, Jan 11, 6:30pm
RSVP (seating is limited)
Art Students League
215 West 57th Street
NYC
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Painter Janice Biala (1903-2000), known to history primarily by her surname, was an integral figure in the art scene of mid-twentieth century Manhattan. Sister of painter Jack Tworkov, friend of Willem de Kooning and critic Harold Rosenberg, Biala was in the thick of a milieu that gave rise to the New York School. But before all that, she was the lover of the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.
Curator Jason Andrew will trace the remarkable life and art of Biala from her early days of hitch-hiking to Provincetown in the ‘20s, to jumping on a boat to Paris and later her dramatic escape from Nazi occupied France in the ‘30s, to her early support of Willem de Kooning and participation in the New York School in the ’40s. Above all, she left a history of painting noted for its sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of abstract expressionism.
This lecture coincides with the exhibition Biala and the Harvey and Phyllis Lichtenstein Collection, on view through February 10 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 15 Rivington Street, New York