Ethel Fisher: Portraits of the Sublime, inaugurates LewAllen Galleries’ exclusive representation of this truly outstanding artist’s work and its initial exhibition focusing on her figurative paintings. These works include distinctive large-scale portraiture of prominent people from her social circle including most especially well-known artists of her time, such as the renowned American painter Will Barnet, the Abstract Expressionist Alice Baber, modernist painter Henry Pearson, painter and photographer Martha Alf, collagist Ilse Getz, among many others. These works have an alluring purity to them, a sense of near ethereal mystery and profound psychological intensity set against background fields of color that confer deep contemplative engagement.
Fisher also had a particularly protean career. She exercised her artistic abilities in a number of disparate genres that ranged from abstraction to representation and included grid-like architectural paintings of ornate facades of iconic buildings in major cities, as well as lush landscapes, still lifes and interiors. In addition to the portraits that form the subject of this exhibition, LewAllen will also present future exhibitions of her works from these other periods beginning with her abstract paintings based on architectural elements, what Fisher referred to as her “Abstract Impressionist” works. (It was these works that gave Fisher her early commercial and critical success and prompted a critic in a 1960 New York Times review to compare them favorably to those of Arshile Gorky. The LewAllen exhibition focusing on the abstract work is scheduled for 2025.)
Both a technically brilliant artist and an individual who pursued her art with a sense of invincible dedication over seven decades, Fisher lived at various times in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. During the early part of her career in the 1940s and ’50’s, her abstract work was exhibited widely, including in galleries and museums in Miami, Havana, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. By the 1960s, however, living in New York and then California, and married for the second time, Fisher became less concerned with seeking wide commercial success and, instead concentrated on her artwork for its own sake. For the next five decades her commitment to painting, its variety and, most especially, its remarkable excellence, was unflagging. Throughout her career, irrespective of pecuniary motivation, she was invited to exhibit her works at various galleries and museums throughout the United States, and today they are included in the collections of such prominent institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, CA; the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, CA; the Jewish Museum in New York; the Norton Museum in Palm Beach, FL; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, among many others.
Notably, Fisher was recognized by the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for Painting in 1965.
Fisher was born in Galveston, Texas in 1923, and studied art from 1939 to 1943 at the University of Houston, the University of Texas, and Washington University in St. Louis. In 1943, she and her first husband moved to New York City where she enrolled at the Art Students League. It was there that Fisher studied with the legendary Will Barnet, as well as noted teacher Morris Kantor, during the early years of the Abstract Expressionist movement. In 1947, Fisher relocated to Miami where she became recognized for her Abstract Impressionist work which was exhibited successfully in Miami and Havana galleries and museums in the 1950s, and soon her works were being exhibited throughout the United States.
A dominant characteristic of Fisher’s approach to art was unflinching fearlessness. Throughout her career, she was undaunted by the artworld’s trends and fashions of any particular moment. As early as 1953, Fisher declared in a statement for an exhibition that “I believe that a work of art is the artist’s own personal vision [and that] a painter creates his own world on canvas….” Her figurative paintings of the 1960s and 1970s were, in her words “eccentric to the fashion at the time,” created, as they were, when Pop and Op Art, as well as Minimalism, dominated the art scene.
Fisher chose to paint subjects mainly singularly, or at most two, in her portraits. Her works, in this regard, were more about capturing the intensity of solitary individuals rather than ever portraying a social milieu. One has the feeling that Fisher was more concerned with relating the individual persona rather than, say, an urban persona. Her portraits are imprints of the importance of her subject’s individual existence at a point in history. As Will Barnet observed about his own portraits of a similar character to those of Fisher’s, “they became a way of preserving culture, of stopping time, of making the moment timeless.”
Fisher creates enduringly gorgeous pictorial innovations from a truly remarkable sense for the gravity of spirit and aesthetic power of seriousness of pose and context. She produced sophisticated portraits that rise far above the ordinary and justify sustained looking. They possess a timeless quality that resides in their profound contemplative sensibility. Beyond individual biography, the paintings in Ethel Fisher: Portraits of the Sublime possess a remarkable autonomy that makes their appeal transcend the particulars of their subjects to the universal and truly fascinating human psychological elements pervasive in these works.
