National Museum of Women in the Arts, (NMWA) exhibits Isabel Bishop

Written by rubin Sunday, 22 March 2009 07:32

Washington, DC - The prints and paintings of Isabel Bishop (1902 – 1988) record the dynamic movement of the people she observed from her 14th Street studio in Union Square. Inspired by the realism of New York’s Ashcan school as well as by Rembrandt’s depictions of common people, Bishop rejected lofty themes in her art and portrayed her subjects – homeless men, working women, busy students – in the middle of candid movements. On exhibition through 17 May, 2009 at the NMWA.

Although it was considered inappropriate for women artists to study naked models, Bishop produced many images of female nudes. She chose average models from the streets of Manhattan and often rendered them in a state of physical activity – a sharp departure from the idealized, passive nudes of previous traditions. Deeply inspired by Flemish Baroque painters like Rubens, Bishop’s studies of human activity often unify figures with prominent backgrounds in what she called a “seamless web” of movement.

Isabel Bishop (March 3, 1902 – March 19, 1988) was an American painter and graphic artist, who produced numerous works of mainly working women in an urban realist style. She was widely exhibited in her lifetime, and was recognized with a number of awards including one for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, presented to her by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

Bishop was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, before moving to New York City at the age of 16 to study illustration at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. After two years there, she shifted from illustration to painting, and attended the Art Students League for four years until 1924. During the early twenties she studied and painted in Woodstock. Much of her early work exhibits a range of study and styles. Although she never took off from landscape painting many of the early paintings exhibit landscape like examinations of lighting, trees, still-lifes, and street scenes often in a forced 1:3 landscape ratio. Early pieces are often on pressboard. Few early works survived her noted self-destruction of her own pieces from the early period left in her studio in the 1970s. She became a life member of Art Students League and taught there to 1937.

Many of Bishop's mid to later works depict the inhabitants of the New York's Union Square area, where she maintained a studio between 1934 and 1984. Her subjects are nearly always women and, particularly in earlier works, some come from a blue-collar background, yet she was also known to produce beautiful panoramic studies of the country and social scenes such as golf tournaments. The portraits are portrayed often as an individual head – the emphasis securely on the subject's expression – or as a single nude. As well as these, many of Bishop's compositions contain two females engaged in various interactions. Her signature changed many times over her career from using various pseudonyms to initials signing some early pieces I.B, or I. Bishop in both block and script

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, (NMWA) the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to recognizing the contributions of women artists. - 1250 New York Avenue, N.W. - Washington, DC 20005-3970 - 202-783-5000, 1-800-222-7270  Visit : www.nmwa.org

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