Isabel Bishop was an American painter born in Cincinnati in 1902.
Isabel Bishop at a glance
- Born: 1902, Cincinnati, Ohio
- Died: 1988
- Nationality: American
- Known for: Paintings and drawings of ordinary working people around Union Square, New York City
- Movement: Fourteenth Street School
- Education: New York School of Applied Design for Women, then the Art Students League
- Teachers: Kenneth Hayes Miller, Guy Pene du Bois and Robert Henri
- Collections: The Met, MoMA, the Whitney and the National Gallery of Art
“I think if I had been a man the relative who sponsored my whole studenthood might not have done so. Men are supposed to make their own way. Young women were supposed to marry. But a young woman putting so much time and effort being so serious that was different.”
Isabel Bishop studied at the New York School of Applied Design for Women and later at the Art Students League, where she studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Guy Pène du Bois, and Robert Henri, and she was a member of the loosely-defined “Fourteenth Street School” of artists who depicted everyday life in Manhattan.
Isabel Bishop is best known for her paintings and drawings of shop girls, secretaries, and down-and-out men around Union Square in New York City, and she portrayed ordinary people in an extraordinary way, often monumentalizing her figures within barely defined contexts, sitting on park benches or soda fountain stools, riding the subway or strolling the neighborhood during lunch hour.
Isabel Bishop found particular inspiration in Renaissance and Baroque art, particularly that of Rembrandt and Rubens, and she strove to give life to her figures and capture the essential qualities of suppleness, mood, and above all, movement, approaching her subjects with an uncritical eye that imbued them with an innate humanity.
Isabel Bishop’s work is in the collections of major museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art, and she had her first one-person exhibition at Midtown Galleries in New York in 1933, followed by numerous solo exhibitions and a major retrospective organized by the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1974.
- Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1902, died in 1988.
- Studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller.
- Member of the “Fourteenth Street School” of artists.
- Her work depicts the inhabitants of New York’s Union Square area.
- Her works are held in major museums including the Met and the Whitney.
Isabel Bishop created a wide range of work, including still lifes, interior views, and nudes, all of which redefine a classical sense of beauty in a contemporary mode, and her work remains significant as an example of the thematic concerns of the Fourteenth Street School, as well as her contribution to feminism and the “new woman” emerging in urban landscapes.
Isabel Bishop’s paintings won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among other distinctions, and a retrospective of her drawings was presented by Bard College in 1989, and her legacy as one of the foremost women artists of the twentieth century continues to be celebrated through her enduring body of work.