The Hustle and Bustle of Isabel Bishop's Prints

That's Inked UP extends its birthday greetings this fine day to Isabel Bishop, a pioneer of American art and feminism. Bishop's prints, as you will see, focus attention on a period of time when American women were transitioning from stay-at- home mothers, to becoming part of the young working class.

Her subjects are located on the bustling streets of New York during the 1930s to the 1970s. We can see solitary figures on a train, or reading a newspaper, but Bishop liked to portray groups of two and three figures as they interacted on Manhattan's street corners, or at a street side food stand. Her ability to get the viewer up close and personal, with out becoming voyeuristic, lets us into her world of the time.

Bishop's fresh, linear style is descriptive and they enfold her figures like fabric. The line is has a tooth to it, meaning I feel it feel authentic, not flashy or slick. It resonates a quick hand, but also she is wrapping that line around her figures to help define them together as well as define the space in which they interact. They are well composed compositions, and any spareness is deliberate.

Bishop's prints about urban women shows the fashions of the day, and how they struggle to look cosmopolitan, and functional. Their shoes are sturdy, but stylish. The bulk of their coats and bags, evolve over the decades to shorts and shortened frocks. Her lines evolve also to tonal studies of figures walking down New York's busy streets, and they lose nothing in the transformation.

Bishop's career spanned decades and she remained in her Manhattan studio until shortly before her death. She enjoyed the hustle and energy of the city environment, and it is reflected in her prints and other works. We can look back in time to when opportunities for women in the work force were opening up and everything seemed possible. I hope you enjoy her work and pass it along to your colleagues. Her work deserves more attention.

Isabel Bishop (1902 – 1988) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, before moving to New York City to study illustration at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. Bishop's parents were descended from wealth and privilege. Her Father was a scholar, and her mother was an early activist for women's suffrage.

Bishop began her art education in a weekend drawing class at the John Wicker Art School in Detroit. She moved to New York after graduating high school to pursue a career as a graphic artist. She transitioned from illustration to painting, and attended the Art Students League for four years studying with Max Weber and Robert Henri. Her work was greatly influenced by Peter Paul Rubens and other Dutch and Flemish painters that she had discovered during trips to Europe. She was a leading member of the Fourteenth Street School of artists.

She taught at the Art Students League from 1936 to 1937. In 1940, Bishop was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full member in 1941. In 1938, she painted a post office mural, in New Lexington, Ohio as a part of the Federal Art Project. In the mid-1940s, E. P. Dutton publishers commissioned Bishop to produce 31 pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate an edition of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice.

She became an artist known for her depictions of urban scenes in New York, from the 1930s to the 1970s, and she developed a realist style of her depiction of women of the day. Bishop became interested in the interaction of figures and the mobility of everyday life. Her mature style mainly depicts the inhabitants of New York's Union Square area. Her portraits are often studies of individual portraits; the emphasis on expression – or of solitary figures. Her style is noted for its sensitive modeling of form.

Bishop's work is a significant contribution to feminism, the "new woman" emerging in urban landscapes and understanding the shifting of gender roles of the time.

The Original Lonely Boy: Edward Hopper

American painter and printmaker, Edward Hopper (1882-1967), was born in Nyack, New York. He was one of two children raised in an upper middle-class family of Dutch descent. He was well-educated and well-read in the classics. By the age of 17 he had already decided to become an artist, but his parents wanted him to him to have a stabile income so they encouraged him to study commercial illustration. While still in school, Hopper worked part-time with an advertising agency, where he did cover designs for trade magazines. He attended the New York School of Illustrating and then the New York School of Art. At the NYSA he studied with both William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. Hopper once said of Henri that he was 'the most influential teacher I had'.

Hopper later went to study in Paris, but claimed no European influence except French engraver Charles Méryon. He also went to visit England, The Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain on his travels. He spent several years searching for what he became known for as his ’American Scene’ imagery. In 1913, Hopper sold his first painting  at the Armory Show.  Although his paintings were showing and selling, he still had to earn a living as a commercial illustrator; something he despised.  

 In 1915 Hopper chose to make etchings, which was a new market. He produced about 70 works, many of urban scenes in Paris and New York. Around 1920 Hopper’s etchings began to get the public’s attention and they began to sell more than his paintings. His prints reflected a similar sense of isolationism as his other work, but the stark black and white of his beautifully etched plates have drama, movement, jossling, bustling and an amazing quiet that can be found under a city streetlamp. His lines barely ‘describe’ his figures, but they are representative of every city’s figures. There are old and young and wealthy and working-class all wrapped up together, struggling to find their way through his sea of humanity with the sparest means possible. His prints are rich and textured and immensely satisfy our desires to be a part of his images.

Hopper moved to Washington Square in the Greenwich Village section of New York City where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1923 he renewed his friendship with fellow artist ,Jo Nivison and they married soon after.  She was his lifelong companion, and became the female model for all his work for the rest of their lives.

The Depression of the 1930s had little effect upon him or his popularity. He lived well and sold much work during this period. It wasn’t until the 1950s when the new Abstract Expressionist movement’s style made Hopper lose the public’s attention, but he didn’t care because the new style didn’t appeal to his realist, puritan sensibilities. He and his wife kept to themselves, and in the last two decades before his death, Hopper’s health suffered from several ailments. He died in his New York studio, and his wife died several months later; bequeathing their joint collection (over 3000 combined works) to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Some of his major works are also found in the New York Museum of Modern Art, The Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

As for his influences, Hopper's visibility in art and popular culture is far-reaching. Artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, and Mark Rothko have named him as an influence upon their work. Hopper's dramatic use of light and shadow has made him a favorite among filmmakers, namely Alfred Hitchcock, Terrence Malick, Sam Mendes  and Ridley Scott. Stores sell countless posters of “Homages to Nighthawks” featuring famous icons James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. He even influenced Japanese animation.

His birthplace and boyhood home was made into a non-profit community cultural center in 1971. It features exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances and special events. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000, and is known as the Edward Hopper House Art Center. www.edwardhopperhouse.org/

Much is made of Hopper’s lonely figures in the big city, and his solitary figures languishing by a window watching the world go by.  There is something truly arresting about his figures, where the person is enjoying finding a quiet corner of a park to sit a read a newspaper. His nighttime scenes harbor the most lonely, bleak outlook. People riding trains looking out at a skyline are like every newcomer to a big city; eyes full of wonder and dreams yet to be fulfilled. And a couple huddled together on a train in an intimate exchange, stops us and makes is wish we were one of those two people oblivious to their surroundings.

Hoppers’ two primary subject sources

were average American places and people (gas stations, motels, restaurants, and street scenes) and rural landscapes. He would give the viewer a pulse of the city as being dangerous, but also a place where someone could find quiet and peace. His figures were usually placed in small, solitary confinements in his high-contrasted compositions, and his more intimate interactions between a couple make viewers become voyeurs. The emotional impact of his work is a sort of loneliness, quietude, and resignation, but something of knowing oneself also come through Hopper’s figures. They know what they want, even if it isn’t where they are at the present. There is an awareness of their environment, and a vision of where they want to go. Hopper’s work, like great cinema, infinitely fascinates us for what is he does not portray, what is not said, but then his images don’t have to. He gives us everything we need to know in what is not seen, what is not heard….  

The Enigmatic Grandeur of Rockwell Kent

Rockwell Kent (1882–1971), who grew up in New York City, was a writer, architect, adventurer, sailor, family man and a social activist. He studied art with several influential painters like  Arthur Wesley Dow at the Art Students League, William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at the New York School of Art, and he apprenticed with Abbott Handerson Thayer. He also did undergraduate studies in architecture at Columbia University .

After his studies, Kent helped organize the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910. He did illustrations from 1912-1916 for a radical journal called The Masses. He also admired the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, and he found inspiration in the beauty of wilderness so much that he lived in Newfoundland , Alaska ,Tierra del Fuego, Ireland , Greenland and Asgaard Farm, in Au Sable Forks, New York. While he lived in Alaska, he spent a winter at Fox Island where he published a series of illustrations called Wilderness. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Kent established a reputation as an engraver, lithographer and illustrator of books. His bold and enigmatic images were seen in Vanity Fair, New York Tribune, Harper's Weekly, and the original Life magazine,  and he is most famously known for having illustrated Moby Dick.

Kent shifted his priorities to progressive politics and in 1939 he became increasingly active with a Communist organization called the Harlem Lodge of the International Workers Order (IWO), he served as the organizations’ President from 1944-53.  He was the first American artist to have work exhibited in the Soviet Union, and he donated several hundred of his paintings and drawings to the Soviet peoples. He became an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Fine Arts, and later received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. A portion of the Lenin Prize monies was awarded to women and children in North and South Vietnam. 

Kent's increasing support for a Soviet-American fiendship affected his stature as an artist, and his popularity declined in the postwar years. He fell out of favor with the American public and his sympathies about the Cold War era made him a target of the US government. As with many people subject to Senator Joseph McCarthy's scrutiny, Kent was blacklisted and his US passport was revoked. 

When Kent died, The New York Times described him as "... a thoughtful, troublesome, profoundly independent, odd and kind man who made an imperishable contribution to the art of bookmaking in the United States."

Kent often portrays an enigmatic solitary, iconic figure in some form of repose or contemplation of the grandeur of Nature; caught in some spiritual/physical conflict, even pathos. Based upon the twists of his own life, it would be easy to assimilate how these figures were manifestations of himself. The interesting thing is how he does it with economy of means. His lines are crisp, clean and while his images are for the most part a small scale, the figures emanate out of their confinement and project a grand, imposing posture. One relates easily with his compositions, which call the viewer and his figures in these images to be a part of ‘the infinite’. Nothing could be more beautiful than his white, Modernist Deco-influenced figures against the dense, black vastness in which he makes them dwell and fight to maneuver.

Kent's images were seen as increasingly radical and his creative style was overshadowed by the new modernist art movement.  When Abstract Expressionism became popular, it pushed his  work further into obscurity.

The Archives of American Art holds Kent’s correspondence repository, while the Philadelphia Museum of Art has one of the more comprehensive collections of Rockwell Kent prints, drawings, and illustrated books, (collected by Kent’s longtime friend, Carl Zigrosser).

For further reading, Kent’s autobiography, called It's Me O Lord, was published in 1955.