ISABEL BISHOP

[From front jacket flap] This handsome book, whose illuminating text and commentaries are by novelist Helen Yglesias, brings together for the first time all of Isabel Bishop's major works. The illustrations are grouped by motif: The Early Work, Self-Portraits, Nudes, The People of Union Square, and The Walking Pictures. More than 70 excellent full-color reproductions capture the immediacy, luminosity, and Baroque grandeur of the paintings; and the black-and white reproductions of over 175 drawings and etchings reveal Bishop's extraordinarily masterful draftsmanship. Also included in this comprehensive monograph is an afterword by Linda Weintraub, director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, that discusses Isabel Bishop's graphic work; a selected bibliography; and listings of exhibitions, collections, and awards and honors. Some of the most memorable, expressive, and satisfying images of American women are found in Isabel Bishop's art. Long recognized as an astute observer of life in and around New York's Union Square, Bishop, who died in 1988, has more recently been praised for her conspicuous empathy with women and her subtle depiction of timely - and timeless - feminine themes. John Russell, chief art critic of The New York Times, who has contributed an insightful foreword to the book, commented in a review in 1975 that Bishop "has a novelist's eye for idiosyncracies of anatomy, dress and social behavior." Thus it is apropos that, in these pages, the life and artistic career of this compassionate chronicler of big-city life unfold through the insights of an author who is herself a novelist.

Like her close friend Reginald Marsh, realist painter Isabel Bishop set down city street scenes in a quick, reportorial style. Her sketches and oils of working women from the 1930s and '40s can be read almost as a feminist statement. In her "Union Square" series and related vignettes of New York, Bishop, who died in 1988, captured odd or coarse facial expressions as well as the quiet dignity of ordinary people. Her self-portraits are striking, and her relaxed nudes, awash in color, are at once sensuous and ethereal. In an oil and tempera series of random, aloof walking figures done in the 1960s and '70s, Bishop integrates multiple points of view into one pictorial space, suggesting the terribly isolating tendencies of modern urban living. Novelist Yglesias has a sensitive eye in her sympathetic essay which pins down the artist's "piercingly loving" quality.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This multi-part work includes critic John Russell's generalized introduction, novelist Yglesias's 14-page essay based on seven interviews with Bishop before her death in February 1989, quotations from the artist accompanying works grouped by subject matter, and Linda Weintraub's art historical notes cataloging an exhibit of Bishop's drawings mounted by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Alliance. One of the first comprehensive looks at Bishop's works, this book uses some 175 illustrations, over 70 in color, to chart the progress of Bishop's painstaking oeuvre. In her own words, Bishop followed the old masters but offered an almost abstract conception of figures in motion. Not fully attuned to Bishop, Yglesias discounts Bishop's own statement that movement in her figures (and probably her whole complicated technique?) was "a metaphor of the possibility for social mobility in her subjects." Still, the book is recommended as a good introduction to Bishop.
- Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Goucher Coll., Md.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.