Isabel Bishop, American (1902-1988)

As part of the Fourteenth Street School, the social realist artist Isabel Bishop became known for her astutely observed images of everyday urban life in the streets of New York City. Though descended from upper-class, mercantile stock, by the time of Bishop’s birth the immediate status of her family was decidedly middle class, but with notable upper-class airs.  Spending much of her childhood in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, Bishop’s home, part of a lower-class neighborhood situated at the margins of an upper-class enclave, literally straddled class divides. As a child, the artist recalls, she was forbidden from interacting with the lower-class children that lived on her street, but would nevertheless watch them from afar, envious of their freedom and friendships. This isolation, however, fostered both affection and an observational acuity for lower and middle-class subjects that would prove integral to the artist’s mature work.

Isabel Bishop

American (b.1902-1988)

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Arriving in New York City just shy of 16, Bishop soon enrolled at the Art Students League, where she began studying under Kenneth Hayes Miller. In 1926, she took a studio abutting Fourteenth Street Union Square, joining a cohort of Miller’s students who, influenced by their teacher, had turned towards the city’s urban denizens as their primary subjects—this group would come to constitute the Fourteenth Street School of artists. Propelled by her cohorts, Bishop began culling scenes for her works from the mundane incidents of the city’s vibrant urban life. Influenced by Miller’s espousal of traditional techniques, Bishop used layered glazes and underpainting to create voluminous, sculptural figures that imbued her modern subjects with a sense of classical grace and, at times, a quasi-heroic grandeur.

 
This portfolio of eight etchings, representing works executed between 1930 and 1959, spans some of the most significant years of Bishop’s long career. The collection comprises Bishop’s intimate street studies of ordinary men and women arrested in the flow of their everyday lives, including the shop girls and young female office workers that became a mainstay of the artist’s repertoire. For Bishop, crossing between disparate mediums allowed her to explore and develop visual concepts, with etching, in particular, constituting an exacting ground against which to test the strength of her visual ideas. Thus, her iconic painting Waiting from 1938, for example, was preceded three years earlier by the etching Delayed Departure, which makes up part of this folio. In a mode unique to Bishop, these works imbue the mundane travails of life in a modern metropolis with a grand, symbolic gravitas; what in the etching begins as an affectionately observed image of a mother waiting in a train station with her child is transformed in the painting into something of a quasi-religious image of a latter-day Madonna—a difference derived from Bishop’s use of etching to establish the basic, grounding visual conceit of a composition before adopting it for her paintings.
 
It was only in 1983, upon leaving her nearly lifelong studio on Union Square, that Bishop rediscovered the plates for these etchings. Prior to this, there had only been one or two proofs made of each print. In total, 60 impressions were pulled, including the ones in this portfolio from the edition of 50, after which the original copper plates were canceled.