Isabel Bishop was born in Cincinnati on March 3, 1902 and spent most of her childhood in Detroit. By age fifteen she had already finished high school and begun taking art classes, sitting in on nude male life drawing sessions even at that tender age. She then went to New York to attend the School of Applied Design for Women and later recalled the city’s post-Armory Show artistic climate as “airy and churning” with “tremendous turmoil…very exciting business indeed.”
Max Weber and Kenneth Hayes Miller
After transferring to the well-known Art Students League in Manhattan, Bishop studied with Expressionist painter Max Weber. Bishop noted how Weber had an entourage of student followers and how he once singled out her work in class because—as Weber declared—a fireman must go to “the worst part of a fire.” Bishop was already developing a distinctly realistic style and Weber did not care for it, nor did he care to do anything more than criticize.
Bishop absorbed Weber’s harsh commentary yet did not let it affect her, and instead she found a new teacher in Kenneth Hayes Miller. Miller’s focus on Renaissance method applied to scenes from modern life was a much better fit for Bishop, as was Miller’s urging his students to spend time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and take in all its greatness. Another influence on Bishop was 19th century American realist master Thomas Eakins, whom she loved “most vehemently" and whose legacy prompted her to travel to Philadelphia to see his work firsthand.
Union Square
After a post-graduation period of melancholy, Bishop ultimately became part of a community of artists called the Fourteenth Street School and centered around New York’s Union Square. Among the group was illustrator and painter Reginald Marsh, whom Bishop had known at the Art Students League and whom she admired very much. Bishop’s flowing yet Rubenesque, richly-fleshed scenes of daily life are similar to Marsh’s work, with a sense of stopped motion as crowds rush here and there on foot or riding subways, or as women adjust stockings or check their lipstick in a compact mirror.
Bishop married neurologist Harold Wolff in 1934 and the couple later had a son named Remson. They also moved to suburban Riverdale in the New York area, but Bishop continued for decades to head back to Union Square daily and capture what she saw either in the park or from her studio above. She was eventually accosted by some resentfully downtrodden men in Union Square, however, who insisted that Bishop was sketching and painting them then selling the works without their being paid a dime. The local police were not of much help, so after that point Bishop tended to limit her plein air sessions.
Career and Legacy
One of Bishop’s major early successes was the 1936 sale of her painting Two Girls to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also had her work shown at the Midtown Galleries for many years, received numerous awards, completed mural commissions and became the first female officer of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Additionally, she was given the formal honor of Outstanding Achievement in the Arts from President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
On the other side of the easel, Bishop’s own portrait was painted at different points of her life, first by artist Guy Pène du Bois, another of her instructors at the Art Students League, and later by Alice Neel. Bishop told Neel she would only pose for three days and Neel managed to complete the work, though Bishop did jokingly comment that Neel’s depiction of her made her look somewhat like a mosquito. Du Bois, on the other hand, immortalized the then 22 year old Bishop in a sleek, dark flapper pose.
Isabel Bishop died in February of 1988 of Parkinson‘s disease, shortly before her 86th birthday and after some sixty years of chronicling her corner of the American Scene. Her work, with its heightened focus on blue collar workers and female subjects, can be found in many American museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Sources
- American Women Artists – Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein (Avon Press, 1982)
- Oral History Interview with Isabel Bishop -- Smithsonian American Art Archives
