Over the course of her 50-year career, Perle Fine refused to conform to trends or compromise her vision, despite the significant barriers to entry she faced in the predominantly male Abstract Expressionist movement.
Born "Poule Fine" in Boston in 1905 and raised in Malden, Massachusetts, where her parents operated a dairy farm, Fine demonstrated artistic tendencies from a young age. She left high school early to study illustration and commercial art at Boston's School of Practical Art before moving to New York City in the late 1920s. There, she trained under Pruett Carter at the Grand Central School of Art, and in 1930, under Kimon Nicolaides at the Art Students League. The same year, she married Maurice Berezov, a fellow artist with whom she had become acquainted at Grand Central.
In 1933, when Hans Hofmann moved his popular Munich art school to New York, Fine took the opportunity to enroll. There, she began lifelong friendships with notable artists like Lee Krasner, Robert De Niro Sr., and Larry Rivers. Her work initially drew inspiration from Paul Cézanne and would continue to evolve under Hofmann’s influence. Fine noted, however, that she did not entirely agree with Hofmann’s artistic philosophy: “Hofmann kept relating abstraction to the figure and to nature, and I knew there was much more.”
Fine began to garner recognition in the 1940s, receiving a Guggenheim grant in 1943 and exhibiting at prominent galleries, including Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. In 1945, she joined the American Abstract Artists group, where she joined the ranks of Josef Albers, Fannie Hillsmith, Ibram Lassaw, Irene Rice Pereira, and Ad Reinhardt. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1945 at the Willard Gallery, and she was later represented by Karl Nierendorf.
After Nierendorf ’s sudden death due to a heart attack in 1947, Fine was represented by Betty Parsons, whose gallery had become the leading showplace for cutting-edge art in New York. Among the artists whose work she represented were Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. In 1949, Fine was invited by de Kooning to join The Club, a group whose founding members included Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Milton Resnick, Willem de Kooning, and John Ferren. Fine and Elaine de Kooning were two of the three female members in the group's early stages.
In the 1950s, Fine’s work transitioned to emphasize color as an expressive medium, creating serene, reductive compositions reminiscent of Rothko but maintaining a distinct focus on, as she put it, "the thing itself." Fine moved to Springs, East Hampton, in 1954, building a studio where she continued to innovate with collage and geometric abstraction.
From 1962 to 1973, Fine taught at Hofstra University, where a retrospective of her work was held in 1974. Her later works, like the Accordment series, showcased shimmering surface effects within Mondrian-like grids.
Fine passed away of pneumonia in 1988. Fine’s unique use of color and her contributions to Abstract Expressionism and geometric abstraction were recognized posthumously in solo exhibitions at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and Hofstra University.
