Women Artists

Isabel Bishop

Date: 1935

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1996.84

Text Entries: Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop both combed New York's Union Square and the surrounding area for artistic material during the Depression. Former students of realist artist John Sloan, they were committed to depicting contemporary American life in a realistic, accessible style, but approached their common subject in different ways. Marsh's devotion to the crowded, garish and cheap places of recreation available to New Yorkers of the 1930s - including street carnivals, burlesque shows, and the spectacle of Coney Island - resembles the French Impressionists' fascination with Parisian cabarets and café-concerts sixty years earlier. Like those of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marsh's works blend a sociological approach to the "circus" of modern life with images from the artist's personal fantasies. In particular, his prolific depictions of women appear alternately sympathetic and overtly sexualized; the performer in Striptease at New Gotham, for example, appears both ostentatious and demure, and Marsh leaves the viewer in doubt as to whether her gesture of modesty, an allusion to a Hellenistic sculpture of Aphrodite, is genuine or feigned. Isabel Bishop aimed to capture an element of timelessness in the details of the lives of New York's working women. Carefully posed for passersby but momentarily absorbed in conversation or reverie, the typists in Noon Hour exude an almost classical calm. Bishop often invited young women employed as clerks, waitresses and shop girls in and around Union Square to her studio to pose. Yet Bishop, who confessed in interviews to yearning for the "warmth" she perceived to be shared among the "lower classes," also flatly described having no interest in her models' lives or personalities. As a result her lifelong commitment to realism has been criticized for lacking the strain of social critique found in the works of fellow Fourteenth Street school artists Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Raphael Soyer. Without information about either artist, would it be possible to decide which of these prints was created by a male artist and which one by a female? The answer, yes or no, rests upon cultural perceptions and assumptions about gender that have shaped the role played by "woman" - behind the canvas as well as within the frame - throughout the history of American art.