Bullfight, 1956
Signed lower right: "Biala" Titled and dated verso
Oil and collage on canvas 24x36in.(61x91.4cm)
Provenance
The artist
Private collection
Description
A painter of remarkable intelligence and intuitive feeling for composition who was celebrated in both New York and Paris for her contribution to modernist painting, Janice Biala (1903-2000) had a dedicated painting practice that spanned seven decades. The sister of Jack Tworkov, an Abstract Expressionist painter who was central to the formation of the New York School, Biala was born in Poland as Schenehaia Tworkovska and grew up in New York City after immigrating with her family.
From 1924 to 1925, Biala studied at the Art Students League with artist Edwin Dickinson, who impressed upon her the importance of paring down a subject to its most essential elements and capturing these elements through color relationships. Biala believed color harmonies to be more important than accurate representations of a subject, as evident in this present work “Bullfight”
created in 1956. The colors and shapes of the bullfight hover, rather than affix themselves, to the composition, in a way that is reminiscent of the works of Bonnard and Hans Hofmann. Biala’s paintings are governed by harmonies of tone, and the results glow with a wondrous simplicity and candor. In 1959, the eminent critic Dore Ashton described Biala’s mature works, such as this one, in the New York Times: “Where before Biala constructed with clearly organized planes—using both color and form to create recession—now her brush moves out in freedom, allowing intrinsic rhythms to spring up and subside."
The subject of the bullfight reflects Biala's lifelong interest in painting French subjects, which included close-ups of bullfights, airy interiors, and rhizomatic still lifes. Biala traveled regularly between France and the United States throughout her life, consistently having shows in Paris galleries such as Galerie Jeanne Bucher, while being represented by Bignou Gallery in New York. On an early trip to Paris, she met the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, with whom she maintained a romantic relationship until his death in 1939. Despite their struggle against poverty, they cultivated friendships with many writers and artists, including Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Ezra Pound.
The spirit of Biala’s works can best be captured by Carl Van Doren, writing in a catalogue essay for a solo show of Biala at the Bignou in 1944: “Biala's paintings are not relaxed like a memory, but immediate like an experience. I desire acutely to climb her green hill to that pink village in Provence, to see more of her exciting Toulon, to sit down and look long at her musical Paris. . . I can only say how fresh and bright and swift I find her total magic.”
Biala’s work is collected in numerous institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Princeton University Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Phillips Collection; San Diego Museum of Art; Carnegie Art Museum; Centre Pompidou; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; among others.