• Berry Campbell is pleased to present Stable Gallery: The Women at Independent 20th Century, marking the gallery's inaugural participation in...

    Berry Campbell is pleased to present Stable Gallery: The Women at Independent 20th Century, marking the gallery's inaugural participation in the fair.  This presentation examines Abstract Expressionism through the Stable Gallery’s founder Eleanor Ward and the women artists she championed. For decades, Abstract Expressionism has been mythologized through the figure of the heroic male painter, yet at the movement’s formation, its members were far more plural than later histories would suggest. This presentation further corrects the art historical record, demonstrating that women artists were always active participants in Abstract Expressionism and that these artists are not new discoveries but long-overdue acknowledgments.

     

    Through its solo and group exhibitions and celebrated Annuals modeled after the landmark 9th Street Exhibition (1951), the Stable Gallery became a gathering place for artists, critics, poets, and composers, including the women featured in our booth: Mary Abbott, Alice Baber, Janice Biala, Elaine de Kooning, Dorothy Dehner, Perle Fine, Mercedes Matter, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Edith Schloss, Ethel Schwabacher, and Yvonne Thomas. Women artists played a central role in shaping the movement’s visual and conceptual range, offering nuance, rigor, experimentation, and intimacy that expanded Abstract Expressionism and paved the way for later art-historical developments.

     

    At Independent 20th Century, the enduring significance of their work clarifies why these women were vital contributors to, and architects of, Abstract Expressionism and its legacies. Among the many prescient contributions are Joan Mitchell’s fusion of gesture and remembered landscapes, Elaine de Kooning’s signature portraiture, Mercedes Matter’s use of negative space, and Perle Fine’s early engagement with Color Field painting, nearly a decade before its emergence as a movement. Collectively, these women artists demonstrate the creative and intellectual foresight that helped shape decades of artistic development. Berry Campbell carries forward Eleanor Ward’s legacy of championing women artists, platforming historically overlooked voices.

  • Mary Abbott (1921-2019)

    Mary Abbott (1921-2019)

    Mary Abbott was a vital contributor to the Abstract Expressionist movement. She was born into a prominent American family (John Adams was one of her ancestors). She lived variously in New York, Washington, D.C., and Southampton, New York. At a young age, she enrolled in Saturday classes at the Art Students League, later taking advanced courses under George Grosz, Anne Goldthwaite, and Morris Kantor, and pursuing summer study with Eugene Weiss at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C.

     

    In 1946, she rented a studio at 88 E Tenth Street in Manhattan, and in 1948 the sculptor and painter David Hare introduced her to the experimental Subjects of the Artist School. Abbott was one of a handful of women to attend, receiving instruction from Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and this pivotal experience clarified her turn toward complete abstraction. She was invited by Philip Pavia to join The Club as one of the few women members, and she frequented the Cedar Street Tavern to discuss art, philosophy, and ideas. Willem de Kooning, who delivered a talk at Subjects of the Artist and whom she met around 1948, was a key figure in her personal life and artistic development. Their relationship engendered a lifelong aesthetic dialogue, evident in her early abstractions from the 1950s that show gestural vitality, graphic linearity, and broad brushwork.

  • Many of her subjects from the late 1940s and early 1950s display the topography and light from her annual winter trips to Haiti and the Virgin Islands. In 1950, she moved to Southampton but maintained a studio in Manhattan. A collaboration between Abbott and Barbara Guest, a first-generation New York School poet, inspired a series of “poetry paintings.” These works combined words and images and were displayed in the exhibition Poetry and Painting alongside work by Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Larry Rivers. In 1974, Abbott began teaching at the University of Minnesota, returning to New York in 1980.

     

    [Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue, “Women of Abstract Expressionism” published by Yale University Press in association with the Denver Art Museum]

  • Alice Baber (1928-1982)

    Alice Baber (1928-1982)

    Alice Baber packed tremendous achievements into a life cut short when she died from cancer at age 54. Baber grew up both in Kansas, Illinois, and Miami, Florida. In 1951, Baber traveled to France, where she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau. She later moved to Manhattan, settling first in the Chelsea Hotel. She took an active role in the Downtown art scene, where she became part of The Club. In the mid-1960s, she became one of The Club’s most dedicated leaders, reviving it at a time when it was in decline.

     

    Baber was one of the founding members of the March Gallery, a Tenth Street co-operative gallery that hosted her debut solo show in 1958. It was around that time that Baber found her mature style, described by Grace Glueck for the New York Times: “Disks and puffs of pure bright color drift lyrically over a white field toward a gentle vortex.”

     

    Soon after, Baber settled in Paris for several years, joining other North American painters comprising a group called École Pacifique. In 1964, she married Paul Jenkins (whom she divorced in 1970), traveling to Japan for their joint exhibition at the Osaka Pinacotheca Museum that same year. By 1965, Baber had become affiliated with the A. M. Sachs Gallery, New York, where she received critical acclaim in the press.

  • Throughout the 1970s, Baber organized exhibitions with the express goal of platforming her fellow women artists, including 1972’s Color Forum at the University of Texas in Austin and Color, Light, and Image at New York City’s Women’s Interart Center. Baber had become active in the Feminist movement and in 1973, worked with Women in the Arts to organize Women Choose Women at the New York Cultural Center.

     

    There has been a recent resurgence of interest in Alice Baber’s work. Within the art market, Baber’s works have garnered un-precedented attention. Berry Campbell held an exhibition of Baber’s work in 2024, marking the first major gallery exhibition of works by Alice Baber in over 40 years. Recently, Dr. Gail Levin published a full scale biography on Alice Baber titled, Alice Baber: An Artist’s Triumph Over Tragedy.

  • Janice Biala (1903-2000)

    Janice Biala (1903-2000)

    Janice Biala was a Polish-born American painter known for her integration of the School of Paris and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Her work, spanning eight decades, modernized classical themes of landscapes, still life, and portraiture, marked by expressive brushwork and a sharp eye for detail. Immigrating from Russian-occupied Poland in 1913, Biala became part of the bohemian culture in Greenwich Village, influenced by her brother, artist Jack Tworkov, as well as the literary world, with The Three Musketeers sparking her desire to become an artist.

     

    In 1921, Biala discovered Cézanne’s work and pursued formal art education, studying at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. Inspired by painter Edwin Dickinson, she traveled to Provincetown in 1923 to study under him. By the late 1920s, Biala was an established artist, exhibiting frequently in New York and forging close friendships with artists like Dickinson and William Zorach, who suggested she adopt the name Biala, after her hometown, to distinguish her work from her brother’s.

  • Biala’s 1930 visit to Paris marked a pivotal moment in her career, where she met novelist Ford Madox Ford, who introduced her to leading modern artists such as Picasso and Matisse. After Ford’s death in 1939, Biala fled Europe, rescuing his manuscripts and her own work as the Nazi threat grew. She returned to New York, married illustrator Daniel Brustlein, and became a key figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement, exhibiting internationally and gaining recognition. In 1947 Biala and Brustlein returned to Europe.

     

    Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Biala produced some of her largest works, blending painting with collage and focusing on themes like portraiture, landscapes, and Spanish influences. She continued to exhibit globally, with a return to themes of interiors and architectural studies later in her life. Biala’s work was described as intimate and alluring, merging abstraction with figurative concerns. Her obituary in the New York Times praised her as part of a transatlantic tradition alongside Matisse, Bonnard, and others, cementing her legacy as a key figure in modern art.

  • Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989)

    Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989)

    Born in 1918 in Brooklyn, Elaine Fried was exposed to art through frequent museum and gallery visits with her mother. She withdrew from Hunter College, New York, in 1937 and began studying art at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, New York, with Conrad Marca-Relli who became a close friend. She also took drawing classes from Willem de Kooning, who would become her husband. In the mid-to-late 1940s she began making abstract paintings as well as writing art criticism. She worked as an editorial associate of Art News under Thomas Hess, writing some of the first significant essays on on Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, and Franz Kline, and making Abstract Expressionism available to a larger audience. During the 1950s she exhibited at the Stable Gallery and Tanager Gallery.

     

    De Kooning was a founding member and one of the few women members of the Club, a group of avant-garde artists that met in Greenwich Village to discuss and debate art from 1949 to 1962. Though a fierce defender of Abstract Expressionism, she eventually became known for her portraits. In 1961 she was included in the Whitney Annual (later Biennial), New York, and in 1962 was commissioned to paint John F. Kennedy’s portrait. In 1983 she visited the Paleolithic caves in Lascaux, France, and began a series of paintings based on the cave paintings, titled Cave Walls, in which outlines of animals are rendered against turbulent grounds of dense brushstrokes.

  • Elaine de Kooning is one the most prominent women to reemerge from research into women’s place in Abstract Expressionism. She has been included in Action, Gesture, Paint, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); Making Space, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018); and Women of Abstract Expressionism, Denver Art Museum (2016), among others. She was the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2015) and was a main character in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel (2017).

     

    Elaine de Kooning is represented in many important private and public collections throughout the country, including the Denver Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among many others.

  • Dorothy Dehner (1901-1994)

    Dorothy Dehner (1901-1994)

    Dorothy Dehner was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1901 and by age 12 was orphaned to be raised by two aunts in California. After studying dance for a semester at University of California, Los Angeles, she traveled extensively throughout Europe in the 1920s meeting artists, writers, dancers, and seeing the latest trends of Cubism and Constructivism. To continue her dance and acting studies, she moved to New York where she met David Smith, whom she would marry. She began studying at the Art Students League and encouraged him to do the same. Not wanting to compete with her husband, Dehner focused on painting and drawing, while Smith’s career as a sculptor took off. Although subjugating her career to that of her husband was not atypical for husband-and-wife artists, recent writings have placed Smith and Dehner as collaborators and influential to each other like Pollock and Krasner.

     

    In 1950, Dehner left Smith to pursue her own career, and within a year she received significant attention. She was included in a Whitney Museum Annual in 1951 and had a solo show at Rose Fried Gallery in 1952. In 1955, she had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

  • Dehner's sculpture emphasized contour, rather than mass. In the 1950s, she assembled her works of disparate parts and approached the use of wax as a Constructivist-favoring planar elements. In the 1960s she drew on wax slabs and introduced other textures by adding small pieces of metal. By the mid-1970s Dehner changed her medium from cast metal to wood. The architectonic structure of her wooden ensembles, with thrusting verticals or stacked elements, resemble the skyline of a fanciful city. In the early 1980s Dehner began a new sculpture series of heroic proportions in Cor-Ten and black painted steel.

     

    Recent efforts have situated Dehner in the canon of Abstract Expressionist sculptors alongside Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Herbert Ferber, Ibram Lassaw, David Hare, and David Smith. Dehner's totemic sculpture Encounter is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Dehner has been included in four exhibitions at MoMA since 2010, including the seminal, Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (2017). She was the cover article in the Woman's Art Journal (2023).

     

    Her work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

  • Perle Fine (1905-1988)

    Perle Fine (1905-1988)

    Committed to abstraction throughout a career that lasted fifty years, Perle Fine maintained high ideals, never adopting a method to follow a trend or compromising when her work was outside the mainstream. Fine was one of the 11 women included in the 1951 Ninth Street Show, along with Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, and a few others. As one of the few voting members of the 8th Street Club, Fine was respected by her contemporaries and was invited to sit on panel discussions relating to abstraction.

     

    Fine was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1905 to parents who had recently emigrated from Russia. In 1927 she moved to New York, continuing her art training at the Grand Central School of Art, the Art Students League, and ultimately with Hans Hofmann. By the 1940s, Fine was exhibiting with Peggy Guggenheim at the Art of Century Gallery and at the Museum of Nonobjective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Under the direction of Hilla Rebay, the Guggenheim purchased 11 works by Fine for the collection.

  • Fine was an active and early member of the American Abstract Artists group. With her dedication to the new Abstract Expressionist style, Fine would continue having success being invited to show with the Betty Parsons Gallery where she had several solo exhibitions. During the 1950s Fine’s work was heralded as unrivaled and on the cutting edge of what was formally becoming The New York School. The early 1950s works had softer edges and an ethereal feel, but by the middle of the 1950s, she was making her most renowned work. These large-scale works were dynamic in feel with a pulsating rhythm between color, gesture and sometimes collage elements, included aluminum foil. Many of these works were shown at Tanager Gallery, the artist cooperative started by Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Philip Perlstein.

     

    Fine and her husband moved to the Springs, East Hampton, near their friends Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and continued to be central to the artist community on Long Island. Fine was aware of the art world in the 1960s as it shifted to Minimalism, Color Field and Pop Art. For a 1963 solo show at Graham Gallery, she painted colorful reductive paintings called “The Cool Series,” and in the 1970s, started painting in an even more reductive style, “Accordment Series.” Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton did a solo show of these works in 1979.

     

    Since her death, there have been a renewed interest in her place in art history. Perle Fine has been included in a number of important exhibitions including Action, Gesture, Paint, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023), The Shape of Freedom, Museum Barberini, Potsdam (2022), Labyrinth of Forms, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2021-22), Artistic License, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019-2020), and Women of Abstract Expressionism, Denver Art Museum (2016). She is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Solomon R. Guggenheim, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.

  • Grace Hartigan (1922-2008)

    Grace Hartigan (1922-2008)

    Raised in New Jersey, Grace Hartigan moved to California after she married in 1941 and then began drawing classes in Los Angeles. During World War II, Hartigan worked in Newark, New Jersey, as a draftsperson in an airplane factory and briefly studied painting with Isaac Lane Muse in New York. She met Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, and upon viewing Jackson Pollock’s 1948 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, she began a series of gestural abstractions (1948-1952). Through Pollock, she met Willem de Kooning, a formative influence and friend.

     

    Hartigan married and divorced several times and for a period of time exhibited under the name, “George Hartigan.” Her colorful canvases often challenged the non-objective tenets of Abstract Expressionism by including references to contemporary life: gritty market vendors, urban storefronts, still lifes, clothing, costumes, and masks. In her Matador series from the early 1950s, she played with sexual identity. She collaborated with poet Frank O’Hara on a series called Oranges, in which she incorporated words from his poems. Another series on bridal imagery, a subject examined throughout her oeuvre, addressed broader social dimensions of American womanhood, marriage, and consumerism. In 1956, she was the only woman included in Twelve Americans, at the Museum of Modern Art.

  • Four years later, she left the New York art world behind and moved to Baltimore with her last husband, Dr. Winston Price. She taught art at the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and continued to paint for the rest of her life. In 2016, Hartigan was included in the seminal exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism, curated by Dr. Gwen F. Chanzit and organized by the Denver Art Museum.

     
  • Mercedes Matter (1913-2001)

    Mercedes Matter (1913-2001)

    Mercedes Matter, an artist, writer, and educator, was an important figure in postwar art and a significant figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism. She was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists and the Founder and Dean Emerita of the New York Studio School.

     

    Born Jeanne Carles in Philadelphia in 1913, she was the daughter of Mercedes de Cordoba, a former model for prominent photographers such as Edward Steichen and other key figures of the Photo-Secession movement, and Arthur B. Carles, an American painter who studied the works of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse in Paris during the 1910s. Matter began painting at six years old. After spending time in Italy and France, she pursued formal art studies, first at Bennett College, Millbrook, New York, and later, in the early 1930s, with artist Hans Hofmann.

     

    During the Great Depression, Matter worked for the Works Progress Administration alongside Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Lee Krasner who became lifelong friends and colleagues. After a brief time in Los Angeles, Matter returned to New York after World War II where she discovered that the artistic community that had made up the WPA now had developed further. In the early 1950s, Matter became one of the first female members of the Club, a downtown artist collective that hosted regular discussion evenings, and she also frequented the Cedar Tavern.

  • In 1953, Matter began her career as an art educator, teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art, New York University, and Pratt Institute. By 1963, she became disatisfied by arts education and began to hold off-campus drawing class for students who crave studio time, a factor that Matter believed was crucial to an artist’s development. In September 1963, she published “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?” emphasizing the need for a shift in educational philosophy in order to, “Strip away everything but . . . basic, serious components: drawing, painting, sculpture, history of art.”

     

    In response to this article and call to action, in September 1964, the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture opened with Matter as the Founder. The school’s founding manifesto, dedicated to the principle that art education should mirror the life of the artist, was signed by Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Isamu Noguchi, Mark Rothko, and others.

     

    Matter spent great amounts of time working on drawings and paintings that began as still lifes and gradually evolved into abstraction. In addition to her own art and teaching, she wrote articles about artists such as Hofmann, Franz Kline, and Alberto Giacometti. She also authored the text for a book of her husband’s photographs of Giacometti, published in 1987, four years after his death.

  • Joan Mitchell (1925-1992)

    Joan Mitchell (1925-1992)

    Joan Mitchell was introduced to the visual arts, literature, and poetry by her mother, Marion Strobel Mitchell, co-editor of Poetry magazine. Mitchell attended weekend classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the Francis W. Parker School, she met her future husband, Barney Rosset; they married in 1949 and divorced in 1952, although they remained close friends. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (B.F.A. 1947; M.F.A. 1950). After a brief stay in New York, she departed for Paris in the spring of 1948. She spent the following year painting in Paris and in Le Lavandou, in Provence.

     

    Back in New York in late 1949, Mitchell became a commanding presence in the downtown art scene and was invited to participate in the Ninth Street Show 1951). Her imposing character suited the younger generation of women artists, who positioned themselves with the senior Abstract Expressionists while forming close associations with a group of poets, such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, and painters, such as Grace Hartigan. Upon her return to Paris in the summer of 1955, she began a complicated long-term relationship with painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. After 1959, she maintained her studio in Paris, first at rue Frémicourt and from 1968 in Vétheuil, a small village outside the city. During the late 1950s, Mitchell’s critical success was further established when the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased Hemlock (1956), and the Museum of Modern Art acquired Ladybug (1957). Mitchell was the first recipient of the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association (1988).

  • Charlotte Park (1918-2010)

    Charlotte Park (1918-2010)

    Like many women of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Charlotte Park's important contributions have only recently been acknowledged. Park was a steadfast and passionate artist for almost eighty years, but it was not until a 2010 exhibition that Charlotte Park's paintings and works on paper began to receive a flurry of critical praise. Writing in the New York Times just before Park died in late 2010, Roberta Smith called Park "a natural painter and a gifted colorist" who "is as good as several of the artists - both men and women - in the Museum of Modern Art's current tribute to the movement." Overshadowed by the attention given to the work of her husband, James Brooks, Park kept a low profile over the course of her career while painting some of the strongest and most brilliantly colored canvases of her time. As Robert Pincus-Witten wrote about her in Artforum in 2011, "The case of Charlotte Park is exemplary; hers was a major gift all but stifled by a happily embraced domesticity and by the critical bullying of a brutally doctrinaire art world." Her art is a strong argument against the idea prevalent from the 1950s onward that women were incapable of the muscularity and confidence necessary to be action painters.

     

    Born in Concord, Massachusetts, Park studied from 1935 to 1939 at the Yale School of Art. She met James Brooks while working at the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. during World War II. The two moved to New York City in 1945, where Park studied privately with Wallace Harrison. Brooks and Park soon became part of the circle of Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner. They rented a studio space that had been occupied by Pollock and joined Pollock and Krasner, along with other young artists working in new styles, in establishing studios on Long Island. They stayed first in Montauk, but after their studio was destroyed by a hurricane in 1954, they moved to a cottage in Springs, East Hampton, which became their full-time residence.

  • Park initially worked in a monochrome palette, which liberated her to focus on form. By the mid-1950s, she reintroduced color into her art, evolving a lyrical style, in which suggestions of the natural world appeared to pulsate with organic life. By the middle of the decade, she was producing larger canvases with complex compositions and charged relationships of color. She did not shy away from strong contrasts and bold, forthright shapes. Uniting painting and drawing, she formed a vocabulary featuring clustered loops, black curvilinear forms that both define and liberate, and tensed and sensual anatomical suggestions. Figurative elements seem to taunt and loom in her art, but are either suppressed or diffused. In the late 1950s, Park explored collage concurrently with her contemporaries Krasner and Conrad Marca-Relli. For these works, she drew passages of color from her earlier paintings, setting them into new contexts. Later in life, Park was drawn to Piet-Mondrian's Neo-plasticism and created open compositions that conveyed permanence and infinity.

     

    In the 1950s, Park exhibited her work broadly. She participated in her first group exhibition in 1952 at the Peridot Gallery, New York. In 1953, her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's painting annual and at Tanager Gallery's annual exhibition. From 1954 to 1958 she exhibited in the Stable Gallery's annual show, a continuation of the 1951 Ninth Street Show. Her first solo show was at Tanager Gallery in 1957. In deference to her husband, however, she began to withdraw from the art world in the 1960s, a position many women artists took during this time. Charlotte Park did not exhibit her work publicly again until 1973 when a solo show of her art was held at The Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York. In the twenty years that followed, she was included in numerous exhibitions on Long Island and in New York City. She was also represented in Seventeen Abstract Artists of East Hampton: The Pollock Years, 1946-1956, held in 1979 at the American Cultural Center of the United States Embassy in Paris. In 2003, Park's art was featured, along with that of Dan Christensen and Allan Wexler, in the exhibition, Three East End Artists, held at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill. In 2013, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center held a solo exhibition of her work.  In 2016, her work was featured in the exhibition catalogue for Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Denver Art Museum. Her work was included in Action/Gesture/Paint, which began at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and traveled to the Van Gogh Foundation, Arles, France.

     

    In addition to solo and group shows at Berry Campbell, New York, Park's paintings have been included in a number of museum and gallery exhibitions in recent years, including Setareh Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany (2018-2019); Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina (2019); Kasmin Gallery, New York (2019); Art Students League of New York (2019); and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2021), among many others. Park's work is included in the collections of American University, Washington, D.C.; Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina; Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

  • Edith Schloss (1919-2011)

    Edith Schloss (1919-2011)

    Edith Schloss was a painter, assemblage artist, writer, and critic whose life and work were closely connected to the artistic circles of postwar New York and Rome. Born in Offenbach, Germany, Schloss arrived in New York in 1941 and studied at the Art Students League with Will Barnet, Harry Sternberg, and Morris Kantor from 1942 to 1946. Through friendships with Fairfield Porter, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Nell Blaine, and others, she became part of the New York School circle. In 1946, she married photographer, painter, and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. Schloss began exhibiting in New York in the mid-1940s and, in 1961, was included in the landmark exhibition The Art of Assemblage at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She later chronicled this period in her posthumously published memoir, The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly; Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011 (2021).

     

    In 1962, Schloss left New York for Italy, intending to stay for only three months; Rome became her home for the rest of her life. The Mediterranean landscape, classical mythology, and Etruscan and Greek art became enduring sources of inspiration for her own work. She befriended Giorgio Morandi and Cy Twombly, while composer Alvin Curran became an important personal and creative partner. Schloss had her first solo exhibition in Rome at Galleria Aleph in 1964 and continued to exhibit widely in Italy, Europe, and New York. By the late 1970s, she began incorporating the diving figure inspired by the ancient Tomb of the Diver at Paestum into her paintings. Swimmers, lovers, warriors, heroes, and gods soon became defining motifs in her work.

  • Alongside her visual practice, Schloss was also a writer and critic. After working at ARTnews during the 1950s, she served as Art Editor of the International Herald Tribune in Italy from 1968 to 1986 and later contributed regularly to Wanted in Rome. Her work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at the Klingspor Museum, Offenbach; the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; and Centro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea della Spezia (CAMeC), among others. Schloss’s work is held in public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany; and the Stadtmuseum Offenbach, Germany.

  • Ethel Schwabacher (1903-1984)

    Ethel Schwabacher (1903-1984)

    Schwabacher was at the center of the New York art world from the 1940s through the 1960s. She was represented by Betty Parsons Gallery, the leading showcase for the avant-garde, where she had five solo exhibitions and was in fourteen group shows.

     

    In addition to painting, she was a skilled writer and published her first book in 1957 on the life and work of her friend and mentor Arshile Gorky (1904-1948). She also wrote extensively on the nature of art and on the work of other artists, including the painter John Charles Ford (1929-2014). Schwabacher was featured in Whitney Museum annuals almost every year between 1949 and 1963. Committed to the Civil Rights movement, she actively opposed segregation in the 1950s and 1960s and expressed the battle for a just humanity as a mythic and epic event in her art. In 1987, a traveling retrospective of her work was organized by the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. It was curated by the art history professors Greta Berman (Juilliard School) and Mona Hadler (Brooklyn College, City University of New York), both of whom contributed to the show’s catalogue.

  • In recent years, Schwabacher’s work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions, including Abstract Expressionists: The Women (traveling 2025-2028), Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023) and Women of Abstract Expressionism, Denver Art Museum (2016-2017). In 2023 and 2025, Berry Campbell hosted major solo exhibitions of her work.

     

    Schwabacher’s works belong to numerous museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

  • Yvonne Thomas (1913-2009)

    Yvonne Thomas (1913-2009)

    Thomas was born in Nice, France, in 1913, and arrived with her family in the United States in 1925. After first settling in Boston, the family moved to New York, where Thomas studied briefly at Cooper Union, enrolled at the Art Students League in 1938, and entered the Subjects of the Artist School in 1948.

     

    In 1950, Thomas studied with Hans Hofmann at his school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She credits him with giving her the “courage of color.” In the next year, she took part in the first of a series of annual exhibitions of abstract art, that became legendary. The first—the Ninth Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture—was held at 60 East 9th Street in Greenwich Village in May and June of 1951. Thomas was one of few artists to be included in all five of the Ninth Street Shows, also known as the Stable Annuals. She was also a member The Artist’s Club, a gathering of artists and intellectuals, which had very few female members.

     

    In the mid-1950s, Thomas loosened the Cubist structures she had used earlier, employing more gestural handling to create works that were more expressively free. In April 1960, after a year spent in Paris, Thomas had her second New York show, which was held at the Esther Stuttman Gallery in New York. The New York Times commented: “Big, brave gestures with paint and color parade on energetic action paintings.” During the 1960s, she also had a series of solo exhibitions at Rose Fried Gallery, New York.

  • In recent years, Yvonne Thomas has been reviewed and written about in publications such as the New York Times (2019) and Artnet News (2022). Her work was recently included in Action, Gesture, Paint, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); Women and Abstraction, Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts (2023); and Shatter: Color Field and the Women of Abstract Expressionism, Art Intelligence Global, Hong Kong (2022). Thomas was featured as the cover article in the Woman’s Art Journal (2020).