Ethel Fisher (née Blankfield; 1923–2017) was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles.Preston, Stuart. "Contemporary Work; Galleries Show Paintings by Lee-Smith, Charcoune, Ethel Fisher and Halpern", The New York Times, February 20, 1960, p. 21. Retrieved May 5, 2020.Alf, Martha. "Buildings as Icons," Artweek, March 15, 1975, p. 5.Kienholz, Lyn (ed). "Ethel Fisher," L.A. Rising: SoCAL Artists Before 1980, California International Arts Foundation, 2010, p. 184. Retrieved May 5, 2020. Her work ranges across abstraction and representational genres including large-scale portraiture, architectural "portraits," landscape and still-life, and is unified by a sustained formal emphasis on color and space.Wilson, William. "The Portrait: New Life for an Old Form," Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1979.Loach, Roberta. "Ethel Fisher in Conversation with Roberta Loach," Visual Dialog, December 1977–February 1978, p. 2, 8–11.Smith, Nancy. "Rooms With a View", Palisadian-Post, August 17, 2006, p. 11. Retrieved May 5, 2020.Barnet, Will. "Ethel Fisher," Catalogue, Miami, FL: Mirell Gallery, 1954. After studying at the Art Students League in the 1940s, Fisher gained recognition as an abstract artist in Florida in the late 1950s, and began exhibiting nationally and in Havana, Cuba.Seckler, Dorothy. "Can painting be taught? Barnet answers," ARTnews, November 1950, p. 44–5.Jaume, Adele. "Cultural Activity, Mastery and Sensitivity, the Paintings of Ethel Fisher," Diario de la Marina (Havana), December 3, 1957. Her formative work of this period embraced the history of art, architecture and anthropology; she referred to it as "abstract impressionist" to distinguish her approach to form and color from that of Abstract Expressionism.Motika, Libby. "Painter to Painter: Ethel Fisher and R.B. Kitaj", Palisades News, November 2, 2016. Retrieved May 5, 2020.
Fisher is best known for portraits of fellow artists from the 1960s and grid-like, architectural paintings of the facades of urban cast-iron buildings from the 1970s.Clothier, Peter. "Looking at Others," Artweek, May 12, 1979. Her figurative work employs color fields and architectural details as abstract shapes to create tension between her subjects and their surroundings and impart psychological depth. Her later, carefully rendered interiors and still lifes often include reproductions of works by well-known artists.
Fisher's work was written about in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, ARTnews and Artweek, and belongs to the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Two Figures(Profile)/ Orange Space, Ethel Fisher (United States, 1923-2017)", Collections. Retrieved May 8, 2020. Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego,Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The City, Ethel Fisher, Objects. Retrieved September 4, 2020. Dallas Museum of Art,Dallas Museum of Art. Self Portrait, New York Fireplace, Ethel Fisher, Objects. Retrieved September 4, 2020. and Crocker Art Museum,Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives. "A Finding Aid to the Ethel Fisher Papers, 1930-2017, in the Archives of American Art". Retrieved May 5, 2020. among others.Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Ethel Fisher, Artists. Retrieved September 4, 2020.Fairfield University Art Museum. Ethel Fisher, Artists. Retrieved September 4, 2020. She died in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles in 2017, at age 94.Smithsonian Archives of American Art. "Ethel Fisher papers, 1930-2017", Collections. Retrieved May 5, 2020.
Personal life and education Ethel Blankfield was born in 1923 in Galveston, Texas to Sam and Ada (Zax) Blankfield.Schneiderman, Harry and Itzhak J. Carmin (eds). Who's Who in World Jewry, Volume 2, New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1965, p. 524–5. She studied art from 1939 to 1943 at the University of Houston, University of Texas and Washington University in St. Louis, under Howard Cook, William McVey and B.J.O. Nordfeldt, among others.Kay, Ernest (ed). The World Who's Who of Women, Fifth Edition, New York: International Biographical Center, 1980. Retrieved May 13, 2020.Angeleski Gallery. Ethel Fisher, New York: Angeleski Gallery, 1960. While teaching art to servicemen in San Antonio during World War II, she met Gene Fisher, whom she married in St. Louis in 1943.
Later that year, the couple moved to New York City, where Fisher attended the Art Students League on scholarship, with classmates including Ilse Getz, Edith Schloss and Henry C. Pearson.The Art Students League of New York. "Prominent Former Students of The Art Students League of New York". Retrieved May 5, 2020. She studied there with Morris Kantor and New York School painter Will Barnet, who became a lifelong friend.McMasters, Dan. "An Old House Gets Its Chance," Los Angeles Times, Home section, March 3, 1974, p. 30–1. In 1947, Fisher gave birth to her first daughter, Sandra, in New York.The New York Times. "Sandra Fisher, 47, Figurative Painter", Obituaries, September 23, 1994, p. B7. Retrieved May 5, 2020. Sandra Fisher would emigrate to London, where she was included in the first School of London show, "The Human Clay," and married the painter R. B. Kitaj in 1983.Taylor, Sue. "Artist Aggrieved", ARTnews, January 1, 2019. Retrieved May 5, 2020. The Fishers moved to Miami in 1948, where Ethel installed a studio in the family home and a second daughter, Margaret, was born;Miami Herald. "Let's Stay Home and Have Fun," Miami Herald, Home Section, August 26, 1956, p. 1, 3G. Margaret Fisher is a performance and media artist and writer, married to composer and new music conductor Robert Hughes.Dunning, Jennifer. "Margaret Fisher in Three Pieces," The New York Times, August 16, 1981, p. 63. Retrieved May 5, 2020.Felciano, Rita. "Artful Intellect," San Francisco Bay Guardian, September 20, 1989, p. 30.
In 1961, Ethel Fisher left Miami and her family to concentrate on her painting. After travelling in Europe for a year, she resettled in Manhattan with her second husband, art historian Seymour Kott. She rented a studio with Ilse Getz in a loft building at 30 East 14th Street overlooking Union Square; the building was occupied at various times by artists Virginia Admiral, Carl Ashby, Robert De Niro Sr., Edwin Dickinson and Harry Sternberg.Winchell, Louisa. "Why Isn’t This Landmarked?: 30 East 14th Street Artists’ Loft" Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, January 6, 2020. Retrieved May 5, 2020. Here, Fisher turned her attention back to figurative work, countering contemporary movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop, which dominated the New York art scene.
At the end of the decade, Fisher and Kott left New York and rented a property in the Hollywood Hills next door to the home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski just weeks before the Manson murders took place.Bates, Colleen Dunn (ed). "Q & A: Ethel Fisher," Hometown Santa Monica, Pasadena, CA: Prospect Park Books, 2007, p. 108. Their account of that night was published in several books about the murders.Bugliosi, Vincent and Curt Gentry. Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, New York: Norton, 1974. Retrieved May 5, 2020.Krajicek, David J. Charles Manson: The Man Who Murdered the Sixties, Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2019. Retrieved May 8, 2020. In 1971, they bought a 1926, multi-level Spanish Colonial home on a slope above the Pacific Ocean in Pacific Palisades; its architecture and ocean and mountain views appear in many of Fisher's paintings.Loomis, Jan. Pacific Palisades, Arcadia Publishing, 2009. Retrieved May 18, 2020.Lonky, Liz. "Founders' Keepers," Palisadian-Post, August 10, 2000, p. 13. The Los Angeles Times Home magazine featured the house and Fisher's decorating and paintings in a 1974 spread. She continued to work in her studio until her death in 2017, after which the house was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Annual Report for the Year 2018-2019, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019.
Art career Fisher exhibited widely while based in Miami.Miami Herald. "Four Art Exhibits Display," Miami Herald, January 24, 1954.Reno, Doris. "Our Town's New Shows," Miami Herald, August 1958. She had solo shows at the Lowe and Mirell galleries (1954) and Norton Museum of Art (1958) in Florida, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana (1957), the Riverside Museum (1958) and Angeleski Gallery (1960) in New York, and Edward Dean Gallery (1961, San Francisco).Bello, A. Martinez. "Gran Pintura Norteamericana," Diario de La Mañana (Havana), December 18, 1957. She contributed to group shows at The Lyceum (Havana), the Museum of Modern Art, Ringling Museum of Art, Art U.S.A., and nationally touring shows from the Florida Artist Group and Ford Foundation / de Young Museum ("Cubism Now and Expressionism in the West," 1961).Museum of Modern Art. Ethel Fisher, Artists. Retrieved May 5, 2020.Tampa Art Institute. Ninth Annual Exhibition of the Florida Artist Group (touring), Tampa, FL: Tampa Art Institute, 1958–9.Florida Artist Group. Tenth Annual Exhibition of the Florida Artist Group, Coconut Grove, FL: Florida Artist Group, 1959–60. While Fisher found many exhibition opportunities, she was not taken on by a New York gallery, a circumstance she attributed to a professional climate that often rejected women artists.
After moving to New York City in 1962, Fisher returned to figurative work and began working with collage on paper. She participated in New York group shows at the Castagno, A.M. Sachs and Capricorn ("Artists by Artists" show) galleries, and Los Angeles shows at the Eugenia Butler and Margo Leavin galleries and LACMA ("The Contained Object," 1967).
Following her move to the West Coast in 1969, Fisher began the body of work for which she is best known, the building paintings, which previewed in a group show at Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art ("Current Concerns," 1975, curated by Walter Hopps) and received a solo showing the same year at the Mitzi Landau Gallery.Ballatore, Sandy. "Current Concerns Part II," Artweek, March 15, 1975, p. 1, 16. By the end of the decade, Fisher was again painting the figure and showing her work in "California Figurative Painters" (1977, Tortue Gallery), which included Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, and "Portraits/1979" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Later exhibitions include a solo show at Michael Ivey Gallery (1986) and the group shows "Portraits" (American Jewish University, 2003) and "Revealing and Concealing: Portraits and Identity" (Skirball Cultural Center, 2000), which included works by Eleanor Antin, Kitaj, and Warhol.Pisano, Ronald G. One Hundred Years: A Centennial Celebration of the National Association of Women Artists, Roslyn Harbor, NY: Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, 1988. Retrieved May 5, 2020.Pagel, David. "Who, What . . . and Why?" Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2000. Retrieved May 5, 2020.
Fisher was featured, along with Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Betye Saar and others, in "Video Interviews of 27 California Artists" (1976), produced for Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. Her drawing 476 Broome Street was reproduced in the book Expressive Drawing (1989), and her painting Santa Monica Bay was chosen for the cover of Hometown Santa Monica (2007).Mugnaini, Joseph A. Expressive Drawing: A Schematic Approach, Worcester, MA: F. A. Davis Co., 1989, p. 218. Retrieved May 18, 2020. Her work belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Crocker Art Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Lowe Gallery (University of Miami), Peabody College, and University of California at Los Angeles. Fisher's papers are in the collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in New York and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.
Work and reception