Women In the Arts - Bethany Arts Community

(click photo for larger image)

Please mark your calendar for these two exciting presentations coming up in March! 

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.

Rosa Bonheur: A Woman and Artist of Substance

Rosa Bonheur - The Horse Fair - 1852-55 - Oil on canvas - 96 1/4 x 199 1/2 in. (244.5 x 506.7 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)French painter and sculptor Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) earned fame for the remarkable accuracy and detail of her pictures featuring animals. Toward the end of her career those qualities were accentuated by a lighter palette and the use of a highly polished surface finish.

By the time Bonheur was in her teens, her talent for sketching live animals had manifested itself, and—rejecting training as a seamstress—she began studying animal motion and forms on farms, in stockyards, and at animal markets, horse fairs, and slaughterhouses, observing and sketching them and gaining an intimate knowledge of animal anatomy. At the Salon of 1841 she exhibited two paintings. 

The work featured here is best described by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “This, Bonheur’s best-known painting, shows the horse market held in Paris on the tree-lined Boulevard de l’Hôpital, near the asylum of Salpêtrière, which is visible in the left background. For a year and a half Bonheur sketched there twice a week, dressing as a man to discourage attention. Bonheur was well established as an animal painter when the painting debuted at the Paris Salon of 1853, where it received wide praise. In arriving at the final scheme, the artist drew inspiration from George Stubbs, Théodore Gericault, Eugène Delacroix, and ancient Greek sculpture: she referred to The Horse Fair as her own "Parthenon frieze.”

Bonheur was the first woman awarded the Grand Cross by the French Legion of Honor. A professional artist with a successful career, Bonheur lived in two consecutive committed relationships with women.

Audrey Flack: Feminist Photorealist

Audrey Flack - Macarena of Miracles - 1971 - Oil on canvas - 66 x 46 in. - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NYThe name Photorealism (also known as Hyperrealism or Super-realism) was coined in reference to those artists whose work depended heavily on photographs, which they often projected onto canvas allowing images to be replicated with precision and accuracy. The exactness was often aided further by the use of an airbrush, which was originally designed to retouch photographs. The movement came about within the same period and context as Conceptual art, Pop Art, and Minimalism and expressed a strong interest in realism in art, over that of idealism and abstraction. Among several male practitioners of Photorealism there is an interest in themes of machinery and objects of industry such as trucks, motorcycles, cars, and even gum ball machines, whereas Audrey Flack, the sole female practitioner, infuses her works with greater emotionality and the transience of life. Ultimately, the Photorealists were successful in attracting a wide audience, but they are often overlooked by art historians as an important avant garde style.

Audrey Flack (born 1931) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, who is widely regarded for her innovative contributions to the Photorealist and feminist movements of the late twentieth century. While her early work included abstract motifs, Flack achieved international recognition for her incredibly detailed paintings of still-life compositions and her monumental sculptures of mythical and divine female figures.

Ida Applebroog: A Long Road

Ida Applebroog - Beulahland (For Marilyn Monroe) - 1987 - Oil on canvas - 96 x 72in. (243.8 x 182.9cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkIda Applebroog (born 1929) is an American painter who studied at the New York State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences (1947-1950) and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1966-1968). In 1974 she moved to New York City. Her work is figurative, often suggesting narratives of everyday life, and is held in numerous public collections in the USA.

She began her artistic career by studying graphic arts and then working in advertising. Applebroog stated that she, “couldn’t make art without also making money.” She eventually left that business to work as a free-lance illustrator of children’s books and greeting cards. In 1950, she married her high school sweetheart (Gideon Horowitz) While her husband completed his degree and embarked on his career (requiring several relocations), Applebroog made jewelry in the basement of the family home, which her husband and their four children sold at art fairs.

In the late 1960s Applebroog was hospitalized for depression. She was released in 1970 and moved back to New York City in 1974 (at age 44). It was there, after changing her name from "Ida Horowitz" to "Ida Applebroog" (based on her maiden name, Applebaum), where she began to develop her own signature artistic style. She developed a series of cartoon-like figures that merged the comic-strip format with the advertising industry’s use of story-boards to explain a concept. Since the 1970s, Applebroog has been best known for creating paintings, sculptures, artists' books and several films that often explore the themes of gender, sexual identity, violence and politics.

During the decades of the 1990s, Applebroog received multiple prestigious honors and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Her art was the subject of a retrospective at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C., and is held in a number of public collections in the USA. She continues to live in New York and is represented by Hauser & Wirth.