Isabel Bishop: Social Realist

Isabel Bishop - Lunch Counter - c. 1940 - Oil, egg tempera and pencil on hardboard - The Phillips Collection - Washington, D.C.American artist Isabel Bishop (1902-1988)  was a member of New York's 14th Street School, and is best known for her graphic art and urban subject matter. Bishop’s work shifted focus. In her early artwork, she had depicted realistically rendered nudes. But, in New York she began to draw, etch, and paint the distinctly urban subject matter that surrounded her. After moving to Union Square in 1926, she became enamored of the area and its inhabitants. Shop girls, straphangers, laborers, and derelicts became her models as they traversed. By capturing their motions and gestures in prints, Bishop produced the walking figures for which she is best known.

Bishop taught at the Art Students League as the only female full-time instructor from 1936 to 1937 and also at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others. She received awards and prizes including an American Academy of Arts and Letters award (1943), an award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts presented by President Jimmy Carter (1979), and several honorary doctorates. She was the first woman to hold an executive position in the National Institute of Arts and Letters when she became vice-president in 1946.