Isabel Bishop

In her realist figural works Isabel Bishop scrutinized the public persona of the modern urban woman with equal measures of sympathy and penetrating clarity. The daughter of an impoverished but well-educated schoolmaster, Bishop grew up in Detroit, where she began art studies at a school run by portrait painter John Wicker (1860–1931) after graduating from high school at the age of fifteen. With the financial support of a well-to-do relative, she moved to New York City in 1918 to study commercial art at the School of Applied Design for Women, but her encounters with new developments in the fine arts prompted her to transfer in 1920 to the progressive Art Students League. There she worked under figural artists Guy Pène du Bois (1884–1958) and under Kenneth Hayes Miller, who advocated the techniques of Renaissance painting as a foundation for painting contemporary American life.

Bishop opened her own studio in New York and continued to work with Miller. By 1928, she and several former classmates at the Art Students League, notably Reginald Marsh and Raphael Soyer and his brother Isaac (1902–81), had begun to develop a distinctive approach. Later dubbed the Fourteenth Street school, these artists all took their subjects from the varied city life just outside the windows of their studios in the vicinity of Union Square. Bishop maintained a working space there even after moving to suburban Riverdale, New York, after her marriage in 1934 to neurologist Harold G. Wolff and the birth of their son. By then, Bishop was receiving recognition for her work from New York galleries, and in 1936 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired one of her paintings.

Bishop made her first etching in 1925, but she produced many more prints after studying with innovative British-born printmaker Stanley William Hayter in 1941, the year she was elected to the National Academy of Design. Both in her prints and in her paintings, Bishop typically created compositions of one or two figures, dwelling on pose, gesture, and facial expression to communicate situations and emotions; she also created frieze-like arrangements of several figures as well as nudes, portrait heads, and landscapes. In Bishop's mature paintings, for which she often employed techniques associated with the Renaissance period, setting is eclipsed by a penumbra of soft, grainy tones that play across the surface. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Bishop maintained her studio into her early 80s and was the subject of several important exhibitions in her lifetime.