Category: Fourteenth Street School

Fourteenth Street School of Artists

Part 2. Isabel Bishop

“…I hope my work is recognizable as being by a woman, though I certainly would never deliberately make it feminine in any way, in subject or treatment.  But if I speak in a voice which is my own, it’s bound to be the voice of a woman…”

-Isabel Bishop

Isabel Bishop, 1959. Photo by Budd ( New York N.Y.). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The Ashcan School of painters was the artistic movement that depicted Urban Realism in America during the late 19th and early 20th century. A few decades later another group of American realist painters, who were also based in New York city, began to focus on everyday life in the city. For these artists, it was all about the bustling area which centred around 14th Street and Union Square in Lower Manhattan during the Depression era. They became known as the Fourteenth Street School of Artists. One of these artists was Isabel Bishop.

Female Head by Isabel Bishop

Isabel Bishop was the youngest of five children born on March 3rd 1902 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to John Renson Bishop and Anna Newbold Bishop. Her parents were descendants from East coast mercantile families but although they came from “old money” they were considered middle-class and often struggled financially. Isabel’s parents were both highly educated individuals. Her father was a Greek and Latin scholar and had a Ph.D in history. Her mother was a writer and an activist for women’s suffrage. The family frequently moved from town to town for financial reasons and to gain employment. Wherever they set up home, Isabel’s father, John, would find work at the local school where he often rose to become its principal and in some cases took ownership of the school.

Ice Cream Cones by Isabel Bishop

In 1887 the couple had their first children, twins, a boy and a girl, Mildred and Newbold and in 1890 another set of twins, once again a boy and a girl, was born, Remson and Anstice. This enlargement of the family caused financial hardship and her father had to continually look for better paying jobs. Isobel did not remember much about the two sets of twins as by the time she was born they were away at boarding school or college. According to Isabel her parents were very different in temperament. Her mother was a free spirit but very strong-willed and in her 1987 interview she recalls an incident that had repercussions on her father’s life:

“…It was hard on my father that she was strong. For one thing, in Detroit, Michigan, women were not supposed to be strong. She simply liked what she liked and that was it. One time she was asked to go down to the court and testify in some case. She went down, but she wouldn’t swear to be telling the truth. She was asked by the court why she wouldn’t and she said, “I don’t believe in God.” It was in the Detroit papers with the headline:


“SCHOOL PRINCIPAL’S WIFE DOESN’T BELIEVE IN GOD”


I really felt for my father. I mean, a school principal! His life was pretty impossible after that…”

Two Girls with a Book by Isabel Bishop

Although born in Cincinatti Isobel and her parents moved to Detroit a year after she was born. In 1914, when she was twelve years of age, Isabel was enrolled in Saturday morning life drawing classes at the John Wicker Art School in Detroit. From there, at the age of sixteen, and once she had graduated from High School, she left Detroit and went to New York. It was here that she enrolled at the School of Applied Design for Women, where she studied illustration. In 1920, aged eighteen, Isabel, wanting to enhance her artistic knowledge and skills, attended the Art Students League where her first tutor was Max Weber, whom she disliked and who gave her a hard time. Later she was tutored by Kenneth Hayes Miller, another artist associated with the Fourteenth Street School who couldn’t be more different than Weber. Other tutors were Guy Pène du Bois, Robert Henri and Frank Vincent DuMond.

Portrait of Isabel Bishop by Guy Pene du Bois (1924)

According to Helen Yglesias’ 1989 biography Isabel Bishop, although Weber treated Isabel harshly and she felt intimidated by Robert Henri, in Kenneth Hayes Miller she found a mentor who, in her words, was “intellectually stimulating, not stultifying, a fascinating person who presented all sorts of new possibilities, new points of view.”

Isabel Bishop’s 9 West 14th Street Studio (no longer extant) highlighted in red, 14th Street, north side, west from Fifth Avenue. June 11, 1933.

Another friend she made at the Art Students League was Reginald Marsh, who made fleeting visits to the classes at the Art Students League whilst she was student there and this friendship led to her being witness to the working-class life of the city. In 1926, she went to live at 9 West Fourteenth Street, which was a short distance from where Marsh lived and it was in this vicinity that she kept her studio that overlooked Union Square at Broadway and East Fourteenth Street and remained there until 1982. From the windows of her studio she was able to witness the daily activities in Union Square. Fourteenth Street in the 20s and 30s was referred to as “The Poor Man’s Fifth Avenue.” It was a bustling center for bargain shopping and bawdy entertainment in the form of burlesque shows and movie theatres for everyday working-class New Yorkers. 

Still Life with Orange #1 by Isabel Bishop

Her friendship with fellow student, Reginald Marsh, encompassed many lunch or dinner dates when they discussed their day’s work. She affectionately recalled that they each paid for their own fifty cent meal and occasionally Marsh would take her to a Coney Island dance marathon or backstage at Minsky’s Burlesque. She recalled that it was great going with Reggie, and whilst there he would sketch the goings-on at the Burlesque show. She said that there were a number of occasions, the owner, Minsky bought Reggie’s work.

The Artist’s Table by Isabel Bishop

Isabel loved the area around Union Square and would regularly visit the Square itself, sketching for hours on end. She remembered those days saying:

“…I adored it. Drawing nourished my spirit; it was like eating. I got ideas there, for drawing is a way of finding out something, even though it might only be the discovery of a simple gesture…”

If she liked one of her sketches, she would turn it into an etching or make a painting from it. She soon became known for depicting urban life and was a leading member of the Fourteenth Street School of artists.

14th Street by Isabel Bishop

The Great Depression began in 1929 and nobody seemed to want to spend money buying the work of an unknown female artist, especially one who had not even had a solo show. Money was tight, people were losing their jobs and America had fallen into the grip of the worst depression in history and most Americans were worried about how they could survive the disaster that had befallen the nation. Isabel went from art gallery to art gallery hoping that they would accept her paintings but with little luck. It was a very depressing and frustrating time in Isabel’s life. A turning point came when Isabel met Alan Gruskin. Gruskin had hoped to become an artist, but while still a student realized that his talents were better suited to art administration than painting. On graduating from Harvard he worked at a New York gallery that specialized in the works of the Old Masters. He left there and returned home hoping to start a career as an author but that never came to fruition so he returned to Manhattan and, in 1932, opened the Midtown Galleries at 559 Fifth Avenue. He specialised in artwork by living American artists and in that year he staged a solo exhibition of Isabel’s paintings.

Dante and Virgil in Union Square by Isabel Bishop (1932)

Isabel Bishop’s paintings focused on the ordinary people of New York City, and in particular, those in her neighbourhood around Union Square and 14th Street. However, her 1932 painting entitled Dante and Virgil in Union Square was extraordinary with her inclusion of Dante, in the red cloak, and Virgil, with a laurel wreath on his head, which makes this work memorable. Isabel said she was motivated when she read the translation of Dante’s Inferno, the first part of Italian writer Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century narrative poem The Divine Comedy with its tales of life in the underworld. In her depiction, Isabel likened the hordes of poor souls that confronted Dante and Virgil in the various levels of hell with the hordes of human beings that daily passed through Union Square at rush hour. In the painting we see a crowd of people at Union Square, the equestrian statue of George Washington in the centre framed by the Union Square Savings Bank and other buildings in the background. It is a very busy scene a woman leading her child by the hand, pairs of women walking away from the crowd, and a number of working class men, portrayed in darker colours, facing into the Square seem completely unaware of the classical figures, who stand in the shadowed foreground of the sidewalk, as if embodying the evaluating gaze of another era.

At the Noon Hour by Isabel Bishop (1936)

In Ellen Wiley Todd 1993 book, The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street, she describes the New Woman of the 1920s and 1930s as:
“…being a moderate sort, who hoped to capitalize on new job possibilities and to make herself attractive with the mass-produced products of the clothing and cosmetics industry…”

Hearn’s Department Store-Fourteenth Street Shoppers by Isabel Bishop (1927)

The entrance to Hearn’s Department Store was right across the street from Isabel Bishop’s studio and she realised that it was the perfect place to find and observe this “New Woman.” Isabel Bishop’s Hearn’s Department Store—Fourteenth Street Shoppers was completed in 1927, the same year that she enrolled in Kenneth Hayes Miller’s mural painting class at the Art Students League. It depicts the city’s middle-class shoppers who are wearing the latest fashions and who visit the shops around Union Square in order to pick up the latest bargains.

Two Girls by Isabel Bishop (1935)

In 1935 Isabel completed her painting entitled Two Girls. It was yet another of her works which depicted young working women. In this painting we see a close-up of two smartly dressed figures seemingly engaged discussing the contents of a letter. Isabel used two models for this depiction and for this work she used Rose Riggens, a server at a restaurant where Isabel often had breakfast, and Riggens’ friend Anna Abbott. The work exudes both warmth and tranquillity which counters the dire economic circumstances of the Great Depression in the 1930s. This painting which took her twelve months to complete was one of Isobel Bishop’s most well-known works and was originally shown at the Midtown Galleries in New York. It is now part of the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Encounter by Isabel Bishop (1940)

In her 1940 painting entitled Encounter we witness an exchange occurring between a man and a woman though the circumstance of this meeting remains unclear. From many of her paintings we can deduce that Isabel was an insightful observer of everyday activities of young women who visited offices and stores in her neighbourhood. Her works present working women as vivacious subjects for the American Art Scene, which centred on the daily lives of the city’s population. At a time of great unemployment Isabel found it easy to employ young unemployed clerical workers to pose for her. In this work, she depicts a young woman and her boyfriend, with whom she is having a rather stormy romance. The painting can be seen in the St Louis Art Museum.

Tidying Up by Isabel Bishop (1941)

In her 1941 painting Tidying Up, we see a woman, perhaps a secretary or salesperson, using a pocket mirror to check her teeth for lipstick smudges. Isabel liked to depict working-class women during their idle moments away from their jobs. She spent more than a decade depicting secretaries, salesclerks, and blue-collar workers who lived and often worked in and around Union Square. She favoured subjects of women who were simply going about their everyday lives, eating, talking, putting on makeup, and taking off their coats. It was these mundane actions along with facial expressions that Isabel Bishop believed divulged the character and temperament of the people she portrayed. This painting is part of the Indianapolis Museum of Art collection.

Girl Reading by Isabel Bishop (1935)

Bishop remained on Union Square, where she kept a studio until the end of her life. The area around Fourteenth Street and Union Square remained foremost as the subject matter for her paintings. She received many awards during her life and she was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1940 later in 1941 she was elevated to full Academician. She received a Benjamin Franklin Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts in London and was also elected a Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944 and was the first woman to hold an executive position in the National Institute of Arts and Letters as vice-president. In 1979, she was awarded the Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award presented to her by President Jimmy Carter.

Self portrait by Isabel Bishop (1927)

Isabel Bishop died on February 19th 1988 two weeks before her eighty-sixth birthday.

Most of the information for this blog came from the following excellent websites:

The Art Story

incollect

Isabel Bishop

Hellenica World

Off the Grid

Oral history interview with Isabel Bishop,
1987 November 12-December 11

Annex Galleries

Reading and Art

The Fourteenth Street School. Part 1.

When talking about American Urban Realism in art one thinks of The Ashcan School, which was an artistic movement in America during the late 19th and early 20th century. The name given to the group originated from a criticism written in the graphically pioneering American magazine of socialist politics, The Masses, in March 1916 by the cartoonist Art Young, who asserted that there were too many “pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street.” The artists associated with this school of painting that produced works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, especially in the city’s poorer neighbourhoods, were Robert Henri, George Luks, William James Glackens, Everett Shinn, George Bellows and John Sloan.

Today I want to look at another group of American realist painters who were also based in New York city and who also focused on everyday life in the city. For them it was all about the bustling area which centred around 14th Street and around Union Square in Lower Manhattan during the Depression era. During the 1920s and the 1930s, these artists continued the tradition established by the Ashcan School. They became known as the Fourteenth Street School of Artists. This group of painters were inspired by the legacy of the Ashcan School artists who depicted urban life and this new group established studios in the Fourteenth Street area and were inspired by the crowds that would daily swamp the nearby streets.

Reginald Marsh

Reginald Marsh sketching on 14th Street, New York, 1941.

The first of the artists of the Fourteenth Street School I am looking at is Reginald Marsh. He was born on March 14th, 1898, in an apartment in Paris above the Café du Dome. He was the second son born to American parents who were both artists. His father was Frederick Dana Marsh, who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he worked with artists preparing murals for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. He went to Paris where in 1895 he married Alice Randall, a fellow Chicago art student and miniature painter. Whilst living in Paris, the couple had two sons, James in 1896 and Reginald two years later. Reginald’s father was one of the earliest American painters to depict modern industrialisation in America. The family lived affluently due to Reginald’s paternal grandfather. James Marsh, who had made a fortune in the Chicago meat packing business.

Self Portrait by Reginald Marsh (1927)

Reginald Marsh’s family moved to America in 1900 and relocated to Nutley, New Jersey where they set up a studio/home at No. 16 The Enclosure, a street that had been established as an artists’ colony some decades earlier by the American painter Frank Fowler, who had once owned their house. This resulted in Reginald being immersed in the world of art and painters who nurtured his love of painting and sketching. It was not just that art could be a good outlet for the teenager but it helped him to socialise with others and as he was a somewhat introverted and often tongue-tied boy, and so this was a bonus.

Four Women by Reginald Marsh (1947)

In 1914, the family moved to New Rochelle, in New York State. The family went on to buy an estate in Woodstock, New York, where they spent most of their summers. Reginald Marsh attended various schools including the Riverview Military Academy in Poughkeepsie and the Lawrenceville Preparatory School in New Jersey. After graduating from high school he enrolled at the Yale School of Art, the art school of Yale University, where he made a name for himself as an illustrator and cartoonist for the Art School’s humour magazine, The Yale Record

Figures on the Beach by Reginald Marsh (1921)

After graduating from Yale in 1920, Marsh re-located to New York, where, in 1922, he enrolled for a short period at the Art Students League. It was while studying art at this establishment that he gained a great deal of experience in painting and drawing from his skilled tutors, especially Kenneth Hayes Miller, an American painter and printmaker. Whilst at the Art Student League he became friends with fellow artist, Betty Burroughs. Their relationship grew and twelve months later, the couple married and as Betty’s father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art he was able to introduce his son-in-law to important figures in the art world. Reginald Marsh was now the family’s breadwinner, and so he began painting seriously.

Burlesque by Reginald Marsh

Gaiety Burlesque by Reginald Marsh (1930)

Once Marsh had graduated from Yale School of Art he moved to New York in his search for employment as a freelance illustrator. His first opportunity came when the New York Daily News commissioned him to produce depictions of vaudeville and burlesque performers. Burlesque and vaudeville shows were at the height of their popularity and Marsh’s depictions of burlesque dancers, chorus girls and strippers. Although some people often criticised them for their raunchiness and vulgarity, others were delighted by the comedy and satire emanating from his portrayals. In Edward Laning’s 1973 book, The Sketchbooks of Reginald Marsh, he described burlesque as:

“… the theater of the common man; it expressed the humor, and fantasies of the poor, the old, and the ill-favored…”

Wonderland Circus, Sideshow Coney Island by Reginald Marsh (1930)

Coney Island by Reginald Marsh (1933)

Mrsh’s job as a staff artist for the New York Daily News gave him the opportunity to explore the underbelly of society: He would wander the streets of Lower Manhattan, and gain inspiration from the burlesque shows along Bowery Street, the storefront windows and advertisements, and the beaches of Coney Island. Marsh also captured the throngs of theatre goers at these shows or outside the theatres and side-shows.

Ten Cents a Dance by Reginald Marsh

 Zeke Youngblood’s Dance Marathon by Reginald Marsh (1932)

And there was the ever-popular but brutal Dance Marathons !

The New Deal was formulated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration which came up with ideas on how to alleviate the suffering of those who had neither jobs nor any money to support themselves. For the artistic community, Roosevelt came up with a number of schemes such as the Public Works of Art Project, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and the Treasury Relief Art Project. The Federal Art Project (FAP), which was created in 1935 as part of the Work Progress Administration (WPA), was one which directly funded visual artists and provided posters for other agencies like the Social Security Administration and the National Park Service. The William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building in Washington DC, which is a complex of several historic buildings, one of which was originally called the New Post Office, was completed in 1934. It housed the headquarters of the Post Office Department. The Clinton Federal Building was one of the initial locations that integrated various New Deal artworks that were originally commissioned and displayed in federally constructed buildings by the Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1936, Reginald Marsh completed two murals for the interior of the building.

Sorting the Mail by Reginald Marsh (1936)   This mural was for the Ariel Rios Federal Building, Washington, D.C.

In preparation for his mural, Sorting the Mail, Marsh completed a number of preliminary sketches of the railway mail service which was located under the old Penn Station in New York, as well as the New York post office department building. He observed the new and modern technology, talked to the postal workers and watched them unloading and sorting the mail. Marsh’s depiction conveys the feverish dynamism of the workers. We see swarthy-skinned muscular men lifting and lugging large bags of mail. The various skin tones of the men allude to it being a diverse workforce of differing nationalities

Unloading the Mail by Reginald Marsh (1936)

Marsh’s other mural Unloading the Mail was also completed in 1936. The depiction in this mural was all about the international movement of mail from country to country. Marsh visited the Cunard liner RMS Berengaria which had docked in New York harbour. The Cunard line vessel, as well as carrying passengers across the Atlantic, brought mail to America from Europe and further afield. He made many sketches of the ship itself but the mural depicts the activities that occurred in the harbour boat which was used to bring the mail from the liner ashore for distribution. To the left we can catch a glimpse of the Manhattan shoreline whilst to the right we can see the officers of the liner handing the sacks of mail to the crew of the harbour tender. At the bottom left of the painting we can see a man, seated, tallying the sacks of mail that had been offloaded from the liner.

The Bowery by Reginald Marsh (1930)

By 1930, Reginald Marsh’s career was well established and thanks to inheriting some money from his late grandfather was comfortably well-off. Despite his wealth Marsh began to focus his work on depicting those who were less fortunate. It was his poignant depictions of the poverty suffered by the lower classes during the Great Depression that featured in many of his works, such as his 1930 work entitled The Bowery. In this painting Marsh has depicted the plight of the people hit hard by being out of work and in some cases, homeless. The scene before us has been created using a brown palette. We see large groups of men, who had suffered financially due to the financial crash, loitering along Bowery Street underneath many neon signs advertising cheap hotel accommodation. Above and to the right we catch a glimpse of the Third Avenue overhead railway.

Why Not Use The L by Reginald Marsh (1930)

A fascinating painting with and equally fascinating title is Reginald Marsh’s 1930 work, Why Not Use the “L”. The “L”—or “el”, is an elevated train that rose above the city streets. The western end started at Eight Avenue and 14th Street, ran through Union Square to the opposite end of the line at Rockaway Parkway, Brooklyn. The painting depicts three people in the railway carriage during the Depression. The woman to the right looks out apprehensively whilst the man seems exhausted. A second women to the left seems oblivious to her surroundings as she reads the newspaper. There are a number of advertising posters attached to the wall of the carriage. Reginald Marsh had accurately copied the adverts into his sketch books and added them to his final work.

One such advert extols the joys of Buckwheat Pancakes while another asserts that this form of transport is the best, using the title of this painting:


“…The subway is fast—certainly! But the open Air Elevated gets you there quickly, too—and with more comfort. Why not use the “L”?…”

Bread Line – No One has Starved by Reginald Marsh (1932)

For my last offering of a Reginald Marsh work I am looking at his very poignant etching entitled Bread Line–No One Has Starved. He completed this in 1932, at the height of the Great American Depression. It depicts a line of destitute men as they stand waiting in resignation for some sort of public assistance. The men are crowded into the black and white depiction and there is little to differentiate them. It is a depiction that represents poverty in general rather than an individual’s poverty. Marsh favoured depictions of the poor and down-and-out people and dismissed depicting the affluent saying that well-bred people were no fun to paint.

The Bread Line – the stark reality. Bowery men in bread line at Fleischman’s Restaurant, N.Y.C. – Thursday 2nd January 1908

By 1932, the unemployment figure in America had risen to unparalleled levels and President Herbert Hoover was forced to admit to a congressional committee that no one, not even the federal government, really knew how many people were unemployed. Nevertheless, President Hoover, who at the time was seeking re-election, insisted that the underlying conditions of the American economy were sound and that no one has starved, and this phrase was incorporated into the title of Marsh’s p[ainting.

Reginald Marsh at work (1954)

In the 1940s Reginald, Marsh became an important teacher at the Art Students League of New York, whilst carrying on his work as a magazine illustrator for well-known magazines such as Life, Fortune, and Esquire. Sadly for Marsh his style of art became less appreciated and this affected him. Shortly before his death, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Graphic Arts by the American Academy and the National Institute for Arts and Letters. His disillusionment at the lack of appreciation of his art at that time became apparent when he received the award and said that I am not a man of this century.

Reginald Marsh died from a heart attack in Dorset, Vermont, on July 3rd, 1954, aged 56.

As usual, a great deal of information came from various Wikipedia sites but most came from the excellent sites below:

ART CONTRARIAN
incollect
ART HISTORY
QUEST ROYAL FINE ARTS
INSIDE THE APPLE