Ohne Titel Rücks. sign., dat. 2002. Öl auf Leinen. 35,6×35,6 cm. Lt. Aufkleber ausgestellt bei Cheim & Read, New York April-May 2003. Erworben bei: Von Lintel Gallery, New York 15.1.2003. {Beigegeben: Katalog "Louise Fishman"} mit einem Essay von John Yau. Ed. Cheim & Read, NY 2000. R. (60450)
Louise Edith Fishman New York, Pennsylvania, (1939 - 2021) abstract, 1991 oil on paper collage Exhibited: Matthew Marks Gallery, NY Provenance: From the Collection of Paul F. Walter Biography from the Archives of askART: Following is a review of three exhibitions by Louise Fishman titled "A Restless Spirit", written by Carrie Moyer and published in Art in America, October 1, 2012. A legendary talker, Franz Kline is famous for saying that "painting is like hands stuck in a mattress." Kline's remark vividly conjures the image of a painter wrestling with the inert pigment in order to feel his image and bring it to life. Intensely tactile and athletic, the paintings of Louise Fishman seem to have been born of this impulse. At 73, she has spent more than 50 years pitching dynamic gestural painting up against the cool austerity of the grid. The result is an oeuvre that is resolutely idiosyncratic and canonical at the same time. In her work, the personal reveals itself incrementally through an ever-shifting abstract language invented to express the artist's compound identity as a woman, lesbian and Jew. This desire to explore the empirical through nonobjective painting is what makes Fishman an important forerunner of much of the painting we see today. This fall three diverse exhibitions offer an unprecedented opportunity to examine the progression of Fishman's formal and material experimentation over her long career. At New York's Tilton Gallery, "Louise Fishman: Five Decades" is a compact overview organized around the esthetic, personal and political touchstones of the artist's work. The full range of Fishman's interests is on view. "Louise Fishman: New Work" at Cheim & Read, New York, presents some of her most virtuosic paintings to date, inspired by a recent stay in Venice, Italy. Lastly, the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia has organized "Generations: Louise Fishman, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, and Razel Kapustin," an exhibition that positions Fishman in the context of her mother and aunt, both accomplished painters in their own rights. Born in Philadelphia in 1939, Fishman grew up in a family of artists and avid art lovers. Her mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, studied at the Barnes Foundation, and her sophisticated, light-filled abstractions reflect a long love affair with French modernist painting. At 95, she has only recently begun to slow her output. Fishman's aunt, Razel Kapustin, worked with the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and, like many of her peers, started out as a Social Realist painter and a communist. Later, Jewish themes became the primary subject of her artwork. Kapustin maintained a strong aversion to abstraction, a feeling that may have been exacerbated by the later career of her volatile classmate in Siqueiros's workshop, Jackson Pollock. Growing up around two professionally active women artists during the 1940s and '50s had a powerful impact on Fishman. In the postwar era, when the popular role model Rosie the Riveter was refashioned into June Cleaver, Fishman was a basketball player intent on becoming an artist. Although sculpture was and continues to be a passion, it was the liberating physicality of the gesture that eventually drew Fishman toward painting. She attended the Tyler School of Art, where she made her first abstract painting in 1961. After graduating with an MFA from the University of Illinois, Champaign, in 1965, she moved to New York City. By that time, hard-edge geometric abstraction had already supplanted the messiness of Abstract Expressionism. For a few years, Fishman dutifully worked with acrylic paint, taped her edges and thought about Kenneth Noland. While early works, such as a handsome untitled vertical stripe painting from 1970, lack Fishman's recognizably robust hand, her signature palette—graphic black, grays and earth tones—is already very much in evidence. It was Fishman's involvement with the women's liberation movement in the early 1970s that propelled her to create her first cohesive body of work. She felt the full weight of the patriarchal construct of "art history," in particular painting's masculinity-driven legacy, prompting her "to figure out what part of me came from all the male stuff in my history and to eliminate it." (1) The impossibility and even absurdity of this effort caused Fishman to re-imagine every aspect of her studio practice, from scale, materials and supports to the very means of getting color to adhere to canvas. For a series of intimate, somber untitled works from 1971-72, she dyed canvas in the kitchen sink, cut it into small squares and reassembled the grid by sewing it back together with thread. By approaching painting as a kind of quilt-making, Fishman gendered her materials, politicizing the given or "neutral" aspects of painting. One such piece, The Victory Garden of the Amazon Queen (1972), landed her in the 1973 Whitney Museum Biennial. In the "Angry" series, from 1973, Fishman scrawled the righteous feelings of her female lovers, friends and comrades-in-arms across each painting, breaking yet another modernist taboo—the one against treating text as image. The works include Angry Louise, Angry Gertrude (Fishman's mother and Gertrude Stein) and Angry Marilyn (Monroe), all bristling with color. In the painting that names the writer Rita Mae Brown, the endlessly layered words "Angry Rita Mae" appear as receding waves of manic scribble. Although Fishman had come out in the late 1950s, it wasn't until the early '70s that she found her community in a group of lesbian writers and academics. Envious of their journalistic skills, she used the idea of writing to generate a new body of work in which she integrated calligraphic mark-making into the painting process. Thanks to the sense of personal liberation proffered by the women's movement, Fishman experienced a new-found freedom in the studio, even going so far as to return to oil painting, a rejection of the anti-heroic, craft-based agenda promulgated by some feminist colleagues. "I had spent my life avoiding sewing and anything else that had to do with 'women's tasks,'" Fishman said later. (2) As a means of creating something authentic from the orthodoxy of painting, she intensified her investigation of materials and methods, substituting palette knives for brushes and a variety of surfaces for the standard stretched canvas. Works ranged from the seductive Caryatid (1974), an oil-and-wax monochrome on shaped wood, to Navigation (1981), an oil-on-linen composition with thick arabesques carved into the dense surface. Looking to Bradley Walker Tomlin, Mark Tobey and Pierre Soulages, Fishman continued to investigate the idea of writing. She took up meditation, and Buddhist art became an important influence on her work. Chinese calligraphy, in particular, conflated gesture with writing. A collection of loose marks functions, contradictorily, as both a structure and a dis-integrative force. It is an inventive formal trope that Fishman has returned to repeatedly over the years. The motif comes in many variations, including the primal Ecce Homo (1990), the graffiti-esque Blonde Ambition (1995) and the ravishing Longhand (2007). Most recently, in Blue for You (2010), she strips away any semblance of structure, allowing manic gestures to dominate from edge to edge. In 1988 Fishman traveled to Eastern Europe and visited the former concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezin, a heartrending experience that transformed her paintings once again. Over the years she had produced various works on the subject of Jewish identity, such as the wonderfully sarcastic Jewish Star Painting (1973-74), a small tondo with "Louise Edith Fishman" demurely inscribed in pink paint beneath the Star of David. Ashkenazi (1978), a striking red, white and black abstraction, employs a Hebrew name as a clue to her endeavor. Unlike the formal and material signifiers of gender that she introduced into her work during the women's movement period (i.e., hand dyeing, sewing, patchwork, domestic scale), the ostensible markers of Jewish cultural identity are harder to identify in the arena of painting. After all, Abstract Expressionism, a movement long dominated by Jewish artists and critics, was ultimately naturalized as a triumphant American art form and represented by Jackson Pollock, a goy from Wyoming. Fishman was deeply moved by her visit to the Pond of Ashes, a memorial built on the site of the Birkenau crematorium, and she collected a handful of silt while there. Back in the studio, she began working on paintings that would be part of a series called "Remembrance and Renewal." The ashes were mixed into oil paint, a theatrical act that rendered Jewish identity materially present yet still largely invisible. Karpas (1988) is a group of four pale, muted compositions named for the Passover ritual of dipping bitter greens into salt water. Memorial Book (1988) depicts three skewed planes that modulate from an open book to an architectural fragment. The title refers to a kind of scrapbook published by shtetls and towns containing stories, photographs and a listing of residents who died in the Holocaust. Named for the restless, malevolent spirit from Jewish folklore, Dybbuk (1990) shows the artist playing out the mythic and macabre implications of painting with ashes. A spectral light seems to have entered the somber abstraction and shimmers from within its velvety black structure. Fishman's studio in upstate New York was destroyed in a fire in 1990, and she lost everything. Devastated and unable to paint, she went to New Mexico with the hope of recovering from the shock. She began spending time with Agnes Martin in her studio, and the close contact with Martin's drawings rekindled her interest in the grid. Fishman saw that the grid could be employed as a form of meditation rather than simply a compositional device. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the trauma of the fire, the mournful, anxious introspection that marked the "Remembrance and Renewal" paintings was replaced by a new confidence and depth of feeling. In Valles Marineris and Sanctum Sanctorum (both 1992), Fishman seems to let go of her nagging mistrust of beauty, and uses a roller to help create a luminous grid made of thin layers of transparent color. Fishman's paintings show the gravitas and clarity of an artist who has fully matured by the mid-1990s. The battling formal interests—calligraphy, gesture and the grid—start to hybridize into new means of structuring a picture. In recent works, it seems less and less important for her to show the labor required to "resolve" a painting. If struggle is apparent in the picture, it is now part of the content and not simply evidence of the painting process. Fishman's worldview remains innately tough, unfazed by the pleasures of mastery. As luscious as they may be, paintings like Moon and Movies (2003) and Concealing and Revealing (2008) signal the presence of a rigorous mind. Slippery Slope (2006) and Splintering Gold (2009) demonstrate a hard-won physical intelligence that recognizes that beauty is just a heartbeat away from anarchy. The exuberant new paintings at Cheim & Read are prime examples of Fishman's achievement. In 2011 she spent an idyllic three months with her soon-to-be wife, Ingrid Nyeboe, at the Emily Harvey Foundation Residency in Venice. The resulting pictures are both commanding and vigorous. Bracing flashes of light keep them in constant motion. Unlike Fishman's earlier, thickly painted images, these seem to have little gravity. Big swoops of phthalo blue, gray and mossy green dive and dance around the center of the canvases, creating pockets of air in their wake. In Serenissima, The Salt-Wavy Tumult and Assunta (all 2012), Fishman's usual ratio of cardinal elements has been reversed—little clods of earthy pigment get caught up in a centrifuge of light, water and atmosphere. Formal and chromatic traces of Venetian imagery—striped gondola posts, carved stone, grand pictures of sea battles, fleshy goddesses and Catholic pageantry—are embedded throughout Fishman's latest canvases. Powerful vertical strokes bisect Calle Maria Callas and Crossing the Rubicon (both 2012), generating a hushed center amid slashes of ocher, terra-cotta and raw sienna. Using gessoed jute to create a highly textured support, Fishman playfully subjects the paint to scraping, dragging, raking, sponging and staining. The big squeegee even comes out in Lolland (2011), a luminous blue, black and gray painting named for the Danish island where Nyeboe was born. Looking across a career spanning five decades, one is struck by Fishman's fierce single-mindedness. By the time she came of age as an artist, the romantic individualism of Abstract Expressionism was exhausted, and even regarded as suspect by some. Yet deeply attached to gestural painting, Fishman has persisted in using her own experience to re-frame its conventions and, in so doing, has produced a body of work that bristles with feeling and authenticity. The enduring value of the "long haul," as marked by the countless hours spent alone in the studio, is what perhaps most distinguishes painting practice from the more collaborative modes of contemporary art making. Fishman proves once again that the hard-won rewards of this solitude can be glorious. Currently On View "Louise Fishman: New Work" at Cheim & Read, through Oct. 27, and "Louise Fishman: Five Decades" at Tilton Gallery, through Oct 13, both in New York; "Generations: Louise Fishman, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, and Razel Kapustin" at the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Oct. 13, 2012-Jan. 6, 2013. 1 Interview with the author, April 23, 2011, to appear in Art Journal, Winter 2012, n.p. 2 Ibid., n.p. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include "Louise Fishman," John Davis Gallery, Hudson N.Y., July 1-Aug. 12, and a solo at Martha Max Kahn, Baltimore, Md., Mar. 13-Apr. 20, 2013. Online Source: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/a-restless-spirit/
Louise Fishman Suite of four works 1984 woodcut in colors with hand-deletions on Arches image: 23.75 h x 17.75 w in (60 x 45 cm) sheet: 29.875 h x 22.125 w in (76 x 56 cm) Lot is comprised of My Turn, Victory Garden, Triple Stout and Glider. Signed, titled, dated and numbered to lower edge of each work '17/20 Louise Fishman 1984' with publisher's blindstamps. This complete suite of four works is number 17 from the edition of 20 published by Mere Image, Inc., New York. This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.
Louise Edith Fishman New York, Pennsylvania, (1939 - 2021) abstract, 1991 oil on paper collage Exhibited: Matthew Marks Gallery, NY Provenance: From the Collection of Paul F. Walter Biography from the Archives of askART: Following is a review of three exhibitions by Louise Fishman titled "A Restless Spirit", written by Carrie Moyer and published in Art in America, October 1, 2012. A legendary talker, Franz Kline is famous for saying that "painting is like hands stuck in a mattress." Kline's remark vividly conjures the image of a painter wrestling with the inert pigment in order to feel his image and bring it to life. Intensely tactile and athletic, the paintings of Louise Fishman seem to have been born of this impulse. At 73, she has spent more than 50 years pitching dynamic gestural painting up against the cool austerity of the grid. The result is an oeuvre that is resolutely idiosyncratic and canonical at the same time. In her work, the personal reveals itself incrementally through an ever-shifting abstract language invented to express the artist's compound identity as a woman, lesbian and Jew. This desire to explore the empirical through nonobjective painting is what makes Fishman an important forerunner of much of the painting we see today. This fall three diverse exhibitions offer an unprecedented opportunity to examine the progression of Fishman's formal and material experimentation over her long career. At New York's Tilton Gallery, "Louise Fishman: Five Decades" is a compact overview organized around the esthetic, personal and political touchstones of the artist's work. The full range of Fishman's interests is on view. "Louise Fishman: New Work" at Cheim & Read, New York, presents some of her most virtuosic paintings to date, inspired by a recent stay in Venice, Italy. Lastly, the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia has organized "Generations: Louise Fishman, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, and Razel Kapustin," an exhibition that positions Fishman in the context of her mother and aunt, both accomplished painters in their own rights. Born in Philadelphia in 1939, Fishman grew up in a family of artists and avid art lovers. Her mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, studied at the Barnes Foundation, and her sophisticated, light-filled abstractions reflect a long love affair with French modernist painting. At 95, she has only recently begun to slow her output. Fishman's aunt, Razel Kapustin, worked with the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and, like many of her peers, started out as a Social Realist painter and a communist. Later, Jewish themes became the primary subject of her artwork. Kapustin maintained a strong aversion to abstraction, a feeling that may have been exacerbated by the later career of her volatile classmate in Siqueiros's workshop, Jackson Pollock. Growing up around two professionally active women artists during the 1940s and '50s had a powerful impact on Fishman. In the postwar era, when the popular role model Rosie the Riveter was refashioned into June Cleaver, Fishman was a basketball player intent on becoming an artist. Although sculpture was and continues to be a passion, it was the liberating physicality of the gesture that eventually drew Fishman toward painting. She attended the Tyler School of Art, where she made her first abstract painting in 1961. After graduating with an MFA from the University of Illinois, Champaign, in 1965, she moved to New York City. By that time, hard-edge geometric abstraction had already supplanted the messiness of Abstract Expressionism. For a few years, Fishman dutifully worked with acrylic paint, taped her edges and thought about Kenneth Noland. While early works, such as a handsome untitled vertical stripe painting from 1970, lack Fishman's recognizably robust hand, her signature palette—graphic black, grays and earth tones—is already very much in evidence. It was Fishman's involvement with the women's liberation movement in the early 1970s that propelled her to create her first cohesive body of work. She felt the full weight of the patriarchal construct of "art history," in particular painting's masculinity-driven legacy, prompting her "to figure out what part of me came from all the male stuff in my history and to eliminate it." (1) The impossibility and even absurdity of this effort caused Fishman to re-imagine every aspect of her studio practice, from scale, materials and supports to the very means of getting color to adhere to canvas. For a series of intimate, somber untitled works from 1971-72, she dyed canvas in the kitchen sink, cut it into small squares and reassembled the grid by sewing it back together with thread. By approaching painting as a kind of quilt-making, Fishman gendered her materials, politicizing the given or "neutral" aspects of painting. One such piece, The Victory Garden of the Amazon Queen (1972), landed her in the 1973 Whitney Museum Biennial. In the "Angry" series, from 1973, Fishman scrawled the righteous feelings of her female lovers, friends and comrades-in-arms across each painting, breaking yet another modernist taboo—the one against treating text as image. The works include Angry Louise, Angry Gertrude (Fishman's mother and Gertrude Stein) and Angry Marilyn (Monroe), all bristling with color. In the painting that names the writer Rita Mae Brown, the endlessly layered words "Angry Rita Mae" appear as receding waves of manic scribble. Although Fishman had come out in the late 1950s, it wasn't until the early '70s that she found her community in a group of lesbian writers and academics. Envious of their journalistic skills, she used the idea of writing to generate a new body of work in which she integrated calligraphic mark-making into the painting process. Thanks to the sense of personal liberation proffered by the women's movement, Fishman experienced a new-found freedom in the studio, even going so far as to return to oil painting, a rejection of the anti-heroic, craft-based agenda promulgated by some feminist colleagues. "I had spent my life avoiding sewing and anything else that had to do with 'women's tasks,'" Fishman said later. (2) As a means of creating something authentic from the orthodoxy of painting, she intensified her investigation of materials and methods, substituting palette knives for brushes and a variety of surfaces for the standard stretched canvas. Works ranged from the seductive Caryatid (1974), an oil-and-wax monochrome on shaped wood, to Navigation (1981), an oil-on-linen composition with thick arabesques carved into the dense surface. Looking to Bradley Walker Tomlin, Mark Tobey and Pierre Soulages, Fishman continued to investigate the idea of writing. She took up meditation, and Buddhist art became an important influence on her work. Chinese calligraphy, in particular, conflated gesture with writing. A collection of loose marks functions, contradictorily, as both a structure and a dis-integrative force. It is an inventive formal trope that Fishman has returned to repeatedly over the years. The motif comes in many variations, including the primal Ecce Homo (1990), the graffiti-esque Blonde Ambition (1995) and the ravishing Longhand (2007). Most recently, in Blue for You (2010), she strips away any semblance of structure, allowing manic gestures to dominate from edge to edge. In 1988 Fishman traveled to Eastern Europe and visited the former concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezin, a heartrending experience that transformed her paintings once again. Over the years she had produced various works on the subject of Jewish identity, such as the wonderfully sarcastic Jewish Star Painting (1973-74), a small tondo with "Louise Edith Fishman" demurely inscribed in pink paint beneath the Star of David. Ashkenazi (1978), a striking red, white and black abstraction, employs a Hebrew name as a clue to her endeavor. Unlike the formal and material signifiers of gender that she introduced into her work during the women's movement period (i.e., hand dyeing, sewing, patchwork, domestic scale), the ostensible markers of Jewish cultural identity are harder to identify in the arena of painting. After all, Abstract Expressionism, a movement long dominated by Jewish artists and critics, was ultimately naturalized as a triumphant American art form and represented by Jackson Pollock, a goy from Wyoming. Fishman was deeply moved by her visit to the Pond of Ashes, a memorial built on the site of the Birkenau crematorium, and she collected a handful of silt while there. Back in the studio, she began working on paintings that would be part of a series called "Remembrance and Renewal." The ashes were mixed into oil paint, a theatrical act that rendered Jewish identity materially present yet still largely invisible. Karpas (1988) is a group of four pale, muted compositions named for the Passover ritual of dipping bitter greens into salt water. Memorial Book (1988) depicts three skewed planes that modulate from an open book to an architectural fragment. The title refers to a kind of scrapbook published by shtetls and towns containing stories, photographs and a listing of residents who died in the Holocaust. Named for the restless, malevolent spirit from Jewish folklore, Dybbuk (1990) shows the artist playing out the mythic and macabre implications of painting with ashes. A spectral light seems to have entered the somber abstraction and shimmers from within its velvety black structure. Fishman's studio in upstate New York was destroyed in a fire in 1990, and she lost everything. Devastated and unable to paint, she went to New Mexico with the hope of recovering from the shock. She began spending time with Agnes Martin in her studio, and the close contact with Martin's drawings rekindled her interest in the grid. Fishman saw that the grid could be employed as a form of meditation rather than simply a compositional device. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the trauma of the fire, the mournful, anxious introspection that marked the "Remembrance and Renewal" paintings was replaced by a new confidence and depth of feeling. In Valles Marineris and Sanctum Sanctorum (both 1992), Fishman seems to let go of her nagging mistrust of beauty, and uses a roller to help create a luminous grid made of thin layers of transparent color. Fishman's paintings show the gravitas and clarity of an artist who has fully matured by the mid-1990s. The battling formal interests—calligraphy, gesture and the grid—start to hybridize into new means of structuring a picture. In recent works, it seems less and less important for her to show the labor required to "resolve" a painting. If struggle is apparent in the picture, it is now part of the content and not simply evidence of the painting process. Fishman's worldview remains innately tough, unfazed by the pleasures of mastery. As luscious as they may be, paintings like Moon and Movies (2003) and Concealing and Revealing (2008) signal the presence of a rigorous mind. Slippery Slope (2006) and Splintering Gold (2009) demonstrate a hard-won physical intelligence that recognizes that beauty is just a heartbeat away from anarchy. The exuberant new paintings at Cheim & Read are prime examples of Fishman's achievement. In 2011 she spent an idyllic three months with her soon-to-be wife, Ingrid Nyeboe, at the Emily Harvey Foundation Residency in Venice. The resulting pictures are both commanding and vigorous. Bracing flashes of light keep them in constant motion. Unlike Fishman's earlier, thickly painted images, these seem to have little gravity. Big swoops of phthalo blue, gray and mossy green dive and dance around the center of the canvases, creating pockets of air in their wake. In Serenissima, The Salt-Wavy Tumult and Assunta (all 2012), Fishman's usual ratio of cardinal elements has been reversed—little clods of earthy pigment get caught up in a centrifuge of light, water and atmosphere. Formal and chromatic traces of Venetian imagery—striped gondola posts, carved stone, grand pictures of sea battles, fleshy goddesses and Catholic pageantry—are embedded throughout Fishman's latest canvases. Powerful vertical strokes bisect Calle Maria Callas and Crossing the Rubicon (both 2012), generating a hushed center amid slashes of ocher, terra-cotta and raw sienna. Using gessoed jute to create a highly textured support, Fishman playfully subjects the paint to scraping, dragging, raking, sponging and staining. The big squeegee even comes out in Lolland (2011), a luminous blue, black and gray painting named for the Danish island where Nyeboe was born. Looking across a career spanning five decades, one is struck by Fishman's fierce single-mindedness. By the time she came of age as an artist, the romantic individualism of Abstract Expressionism was exhausted, and even regarded as suspect by some. Yet deeply attached to gestural painting, Fishman has persisted in using her own experience to re-frame its conventions and, in so doing, has produced a body of work that bristles with feeling and authenticity. The enduring value of the "long haul," as marked by the countless hours spent alone in the studio, is what perhaps most distinguishes painting practice from the more collaborative modes of contemporary art making. Fishman proves once again that the hard-won rewards of this solitude can be glorious. Currently On View "Louise Fishman: New Work" at Cheim & Read, through Oct. 27, and "Louise Fishman: Five Decades" at Tilton Gallery, through Oct 13, both in New York; "Generations: Louise Fishman, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, and Razel Kapustin" at the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Oct. 13, 2012-Jan. 6, 2013. 1 Interview with the author, April 23, 2011, to appear in Art Journal, Winter 2012, n.p. 2 Ibid., n.p. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include "Louise Fishman," John Davis Gallery, Hudson N.Y., July 1-Aug. 12, and a solo at Martha Max Kahn, Baltimore, Md., Mar. 13-Apr. 20, 2013. Online Source: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/a-restless-spirit/
Louise Fishman American, (1939-2021) Untitled, 1985 charcoal on paper Label verso: Lennon, Weinberg Inc., New York. Biography excerpt from the Archives of askART: "Louise Fishman, Who Gave Abstract Expressionism a New Tone, Dies at 82, Obituary", The New York Times, by Neil Genzlinger, August 3, 2021 Her paintings infused a once-male-dominated genre with a feminist, lesbian sensibility. Louise Fishman, a widely exhibited artist who imbued her Abstract Expressionist paintings and other works with elements of feminism and gay and Jewish identity, died on July 26 in Manhattan. She was 82. Her spouse, Ingrid Nyeboe, said the cause was complications of an ablation, a heart procedure. Ms. Fishman continually explored new themes and techniques, usually giving her own spin to the male-dominated genre of Abstract Expressionism. She was influenced early in her career by the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, men from the Jackson Pollock era, but by the mid-1960s she began to immerse herself in the gay and feminist movements, joining protest organizations like WITCH — the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell — and sharing ideas and frustrations with other women in a consciousness-raising group. It led her to rethink her art "I decided never to paint again unless it came out of my own experience," she told The Brooklyn Rail in 2012. "Because, I've said this many times, being in my woman's group and examining deeply where everything came from in my work, I realized that I hadn't had a thought outside of the male tradition of art history and contemporary art history." Among the works she produced after that was her "Angry" series, begun in the early 1970s, each canvas a name amid a furious field of paint. It was intended to evoke the anger she imagined was felt by women in her group as well as various public figures. There was Angry Marilyn, for Marilyn Monroe, and Angry Paula, for the gallerist Paula Cooper. And, of course, Angry Louise. After a trip to Central Europe in 1988 with a friend who was a Holocaust survivor, Ms. Fishman expanded on the Jewish and Holocaust themes that she had already begun to explore. For some of the works she made in that period, she mixed her paint with ash she had picked up in Auschwitz. These types of paintings set her apart from the original Abstract Expressionists. "Unlike Ab-Ex, which, despite its chest-thumping angst, was largely apolitical, Ms. Fishman hasn't hesitated to introduce topical experience into her canvases," John Goodrich wrote in The New York Sun in 2006
Louise Fishman Untitled 1975 oil and pencil on paper 29 h x 24.625 w in (74 x 63 cm) This work is being sold to benefit the Louise Fishman Foundation. Signed and dated to verso 'Louise Fishman 1975'. Provenance: Estate of Louise Fishman This work will ship from Lambertville, New Jersey.
Louise Fishman The Mirror of Ink 2017 oil on canvas 30 h x 30 w in (76 x 76 cm) This work is being sold to benefit the Louise Fishman Foundation. Signed, titled and dated to verso 'Louise Fishman 2017 The Mirror of Ink'. Provenance: Estate of Louise Fishman This work will ship from Lambertville, New Jersey.
Louise Fishman Untitled 2005 acrylic on paper 25.25 h x 30 w in (64 x 76 cm) This work is being sold to benefit the Louise Fishman Foundation. Signed and dated to lower right 'Fishman 2005'. Provenance: Estate of Louise Fishman This work will ship from Lambertville, New Jersey.
Louise Fishman Ghost Lover 2007 oil on jute 41 h x 36 w in (104 x 91 cm) This work is being sold to benefit the Louise Fishman Foundation. Signed, titled and dated to verso 'Louise Fishman 2007 Ghost Lover'. Provenance: Estate of Louise Fishman This work will ship from Lambertville, New Jersey.
Ohne Titel Rücks. sign., dat. 2002. Öl auf Leinen. 35,6×35,6 cm. Lt. Aufkleber ausgestellt bei Cheim & Read, New York April-May 2003. Erworben bei: Von Lintel Gallery, New York 15.1.2003. {Beigegeben: Katalog "Louise Fishman"} mit einem Essay von John Yau. Ed. Cheim & Read, NY 2000. R. (60450)
Louise Fishman (American, 1939-2021) Nothing is Preventing Them, 1976 oil and wax on paper signed Louise Fishman, titled and dated (verso) 30 3/4 x 22 1/2 inches. Property from a Private Art Collection
Louise Fishman Suite of four works 1984 woodcut in colors with hand-deletions on Arches image: 23.5 h x 17.75 w in (60 x 45 cm) sheet: 30 h x 22 w in (76 x 56 cm) Lot is comprised of My Turn, Victory Garden, Glider, and Triple Stout. Signed, titled, dated and numbered to lower edge of each work '2/20 Louise Fishman 1984' with blindstamps. This complete suite of four works is number 2 from the edition of 20 published by Mere Image, Inc., New York. Sold with digital copies of the print documentation from Mere Image, Inc. This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.
Louise Fishman (American, 1939-2021) Sipapu Signed, titled and dated 1991 verso, oil on linen. (14 1/8 x 12 1/8 in. (35.9 x 30.8cm)) Provenance Robert Miller Gallery, New York, New York. Private Collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. To request a condition report, or for any additional information, please email Adrianne Wolkenberg at awolkenberg@freemansauction.com.
LOUISE FISHMAN (AMERICAN 1939-2021) Trouble in Mind, 2002 oil on canvas 97 x 82 cm (38 1/4 x 32 1/4 in.) unframed signed and dated on verso PROVENANCE Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner EXHIBITED Nielsen Gallery, Boston
LOUISE FISHMAN (AMERICAN 1939-2021) Untitled, circa 1965 oil on canvas 40.5 x 40.5 cm (16 x 16 in.) unframed signed on verso PROVENANCE Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner EXHIBITED Cheim & Read, New York
Louise Fishman Untitled 1990 watercolor on paper 7.5 h × 5.5 w in (19 × 14 cm) Signed and inscribed to verso 'Louise Fishman Fism-0144'. Provenance: Robert Miller Gallery, New York | Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery, Stamford, CT | Estate of Valerie Furth, New York This work will ship from Rago in Lambertville, New Jersey.
Louise Fishman Untitled #20 1989 gouache and watercolor on paper 13.75 h × 9.75 w in (35 × 25 cm) Signed, titled and dated to verso 'Louise Fishman 2/89 #20'. Provenance: Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery, Stamford, CT | Estate of Valerie Furth, New York This work will ship from Rago in Lambertville, New Jersey.
Louise Fishman Untitled (For Carl) 1999 mixed media on paper 23 h × 31 w in (58 × 79 cm) Signed, dated and inscribed to verso of frame 'Louise Fishman 1999 For Carl'. Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by Carl Plansky | Private Collection This work will ship from Rago in Lambertville, New Jersey.
Louise Fishman Untitled 2005 monoprint image: 23.75 h × 18.875 w in (60 × 48 cm) sheet: 29.5 h × 24 w in (75 × 61 cm) Signed and dated to lower right 'Louise Fishman 8/05'. This work will ship from Rago in Lambertville, New Jersey. condition: Work is in good overall condition with one pinpoint of errant pigment to lower right. Sheet shows one minor crescent crease near center of lower edge and one soft crease to lower right corner, both visible only in raking light. Work presents well. Unframed.
Louise Fishman Suite of four works 1983-1984 woodcut in colors with hand-deletions on Arches image: 23.75 h × 17.75 w in (60 × 45 cm) sheet: 30 h × 22.25 w in (76 × 57 cm) This complete suite of four works is comprised of My Turn, Victory Garden, Glider, and Triple Stout. Signed, titled, dated and numbered to lower edge of each work '14/20 Louise Fishman' with blindstamps. These works are number 14 from the edition of 20 published by Mere Image, Inc., New York. Sold with digital copies of print documentation from Mere Image, Inc. signed by the artist. Provenance: Private Collection, Santa Fe This work will ship from LAMA in Los Angeles, California. condition: Each work in overall excellent condition. "My Turn" with a few light handling marks to top at upper left corner. Colors are bright. Unframed.
Louise Fishman Tree 1993 oil on linen over panel 12 h × 12 w in (30 × 30 cm) Signed, titled and dated to verso 'Tree Louise Fishman 1993'. This work will ship from Rago in Lambertville, New Jersey. Condition of the item is not included in this description. Condition reports are available from Rago upon request. Rago strongly recommends that you review a condition report for each item on which you plan to bid. Email condition@ragoarts.com to request a condition report.
LOUISE FISHMAN (1939-2021) The Mob Within the Heart 1993 signed, titled, and dated 1993 on the reverse oil on canvas 60 by 50 in. 152.4 by 127 cm. For further information on this lot please visit the Bonhams website
Louise Edith Fishman American, (1939-2021) Untitled, 1989 tempera on paper Provenance: From a private collector, Indianapolis. Provenance; Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. NY, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, NY, and Robert Miller Gallery, New York. From the archives of AskArt: Louise Edith Fishman was born on Jan. 14, 1939, in Philadelphia. She had art in her genes: Her mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, was an artist, as was an aunt, Razel Kapustin. Her father, Edward, was an accountant. She grew up in Philadelphia immersed in art thanks to her mother — she would sometimes accompany her mother to drawing classes. Years later she incorporated elements of two games she had played in her youth into grid paintings. "One was the basketball court, basically a grid, and I knew where my foot was at all times in relation to the foul line and the half-court line," she told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2019, when she had an exhibition at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. "Same thing when I would play bottle tops. You would make a court on the street with chalk, then get down on the street and shoot these bottle tops around these different boxes. She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as well as at the Tyler School of Art, part of Temple University. She earned bachelor's degrees in painting and printmaking and in art education at Temple in 1963, then received a master's degree in painting and printmaking at the University of Illinois at Champaign in 1965. She moved to New York that year, and was already well into Abstract Expressionism. "I felt that Abstract Expressionist work was an appropriate language for me as a queer," she said in an interview quoted in a catalog for a 2016 retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. "It was a hidden language, on the radical fringe, a language appropriate to being separate." In her long career Ms. Fishman had dozens of solo shows and was featured in countless group shows. Her artistic forays included abandoning paint-on-canvas for a time in the 1970s and exploring aspects of traditional women's crafts; in some works she stitched together strips of canvas in quiltlike fashion. In addition to Ms. Nyeboe, whom she married in 2012, she is survived by a brother, S.J. Fishman. Ms. Fishman bought a farmhouse in upstate New York in 1987 and used it as a studio and second home. When fire destroyed that studio in 1990, she spent time in New Mexico, recovering her equilibrium and working with the painter Agnes Martin. She began absorbing Chinese philosophies and traditions, and her works from this period show elements of Chinese calligraphy. She continued to impress critics into the new century.
LOUISE FISHMAN (b. 1939): UNTITLED Oil on paper with collage, signed 'Louise' and dated on the reverse, 1990. 11 x 11 in. (sheet), 16 x 15 1/4 in. (frame). Provenance: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. The Collection of Paul F. Walter
Louise Fishman (b. 1939) Nishmat signed, titled and dated 'Louise Fishman NISHMAT 1988' (on the reverse) oil on linen 85 x 60 in. (215.9 x 152.4 cm.) Painted in 1988.
Louise Fishman (AMERICAN, 1939) Untitled Acrylic on canvas 2004 Signed, dated and annotated in pencil, verso Dimensions: 18 x 14 1/2 inches (45 x 36 3/4 cm) In overall good condition A comparable piece was sold at Phillips, New York for $22,000 Ex-collection Cheim & Read, New York, with the label and ink stamp verso Contact department for full condition report Louise Fishman's 2004 painting, "Untitled," is both tactile and athletic, bringing forth an emotive force. Characteristic of the artist's interest in Abstract Expressionism, Fisher's brushstrokes are loose and gestural, varying in thickness and pressure across the surface, which allows much of the canvas's natural weave to show through. The overall composition of large vertical strokes cut through by thin horizontal drips recalls a woven pattern, recalling a traditionally feminine crafts. The horizontal drips suggest that Fishman painted the work, at least partially, in landscape format, to be displayed as a portrait. The 2004 acrylic on canvas painting is signed, dated and annotated in pencil, on the verso of the canvas. Measuring 18 by 14 ½ inches, the work is in overall good condition. It is ex-collection Cheim & Read, New York, with the label and ink stamp on the verso. Louise Fishman (AMERICAN, 1939) Louise Fishman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1939. She attended Philadelphia College of Art from 1956 to 1957, transferred to Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and finally received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art. She received her MFA from University of Illinois in 1965. At her first attempts as an artist, Fishman did not have much success. However, with the rise of the feminist movement, she gained more acclaim. She made paintings that represented women's domestic and traditional tasks and required lengthy techniques that mirrored activities such as stitching and sewing. Fishman later returned to abstract painting and become influenced by a trip to Europe that involved survivors of the Holocaust. Fishman is still active in the art community and has been awarded many grants and awards.
Louise Fishman Venerable Friends, 1990 Signed Louise Fishman on the stretcher, inscribed as titled and dated 1990 on the reverse Oil on canvas 14 x 12 inches C
LOUISE FISHMAN Untitled. Acrylic on canvas, 2004. 460x370 mm; 18x14 1/2 inches. Signed, dated and annotated in pencil, verso. Ex-collection Cheim & Read, New York, with the label and ink stamp verso.
Louise Fishman (American, b. 1939) Diptych, 1995, printed by Nancy Bressler at the Yale University Press. Unsigned on the recto; prints are hinged at top, bottom, and center so verso not inspected. Color monoprints on black paper, sheet sizes 12 7/8 x 8 1/8 in. (32.5 x 20.5 cm), presented on a common mount, unmatted, unframed. Condition: Most edges deckled. Provenance: Purchased at the artist's studio in Chelsea on February 22, 1995, by the present collector. N.B. The image was created by inking wood veneers and arranging them on the bed of the press, then making a print. A photocopy referencing the work, from Target Editions, New York, accompanies the lot.
LOUISE FISHMAN (american, b. 1939)/span "THE FRONT, THE BACK, AND THE MIDDLE" Signed, titled and dated 1991 verso, oil on linen 32 x 50 in. (81.4 x 127cm) Unframed provenance: /spanRobert Miller Gallery, New York, New York. Private Collection, Pennsylvania. (Purchased from the above in 1993).
four prints /spanLOUISE FISHMAN (american b. 1939)/span "BLACK AND WHITE" plates 1,3,4 and 5/span 2005, each pencil signed and dated '8/05,' one numbered 14/15 and three numbered 15/15, all with full margins; Riverhouse Editions, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, publisher. Four etching and aquatints on wove paper. each image: various each sheet: 14 x 18 in. (35.5 x 45.6cm) (4). provenance: /spanLehman Brothers Collection.
(i) Louise Fishman American, b. 1939 Candle, 1989 Signed Fishman on the reverse Oil on paper 7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm) (ii) Donald Sultan American, b. 1951 Candle, 1989 Signed Donald Sultan on the reverse Oil on paper 7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm) (iii) Bryan Hunt American, b. 1947 Candle, 1989 Signed B.H. (lr) and dated 3-89 (ll); signed Bryan Hunt and dated 3-89 on the reverse Watercolor and pencil on paper laid to panel 7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm) (iv) Earl Staley American, b. 1938 Candle, 1989 Signed Staley and dated '89 on the reverse Arylic on paper 7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm) (v) Richard Yarde American, b. 1939 Candle, 1989 Signed Yarde (lr) Watercolor on paper 12 1/2 x 10 7/8 inches (31.75 x 27.6 cm) (vi) Bill Beckley American, b. 1946 Candle, 1989 Signed B.Beckley and dated 1989 (lr) Ink and watecolor on paper 7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm) (vii) Walton Ford American, b. 1960 Candle, 1989 Signed Walton Ford and dated 1989 (ll) 7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm) (viii) Jennifer Bartlett American, b. 1941 Candle, 1989 Watercolor on paper 8 x 6 inches (20.3 x 15.2 cm) (ix) Greg Drasler American, b. 1952 Candle, 1989 Signed G.D. and dated '89 (lr); signed Drasler on the reverse Oil on paper 7 7/8 x 6 1/2 inches (20 x 16.5 cm)
four prints /spanLOUISE FISHMAN (american b. 1939)/span "BLACK AND WHITE " plates 1,3,4 and 5/span 2005, each pencil signed and dated '8/05,' one numbered 14/15 and three numbered 15/15, all with full margins; Riverhouse Editions, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, publisher. Four etching and aquatints on wove paper. each image: various each sheet: 14 x 18 in. (35.5 x 45.6cm) (4). provenance: /spanLehman Brothers Collection.
three monoprints LOUISE FISHMAN (american b. 1939) "ELK RIVER #58, #78, #44" 2005, each pencil signed and dated, with full margins; Riverhouse Editions, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, publisher, and with their blindstamp. Three unique watercolor monoprints. image: 18 3/4 x 23 5/8 in. (47.6 x 60cm) sheet: 24 1/4 x 28 7/8 in. (61.6 x 73.4cm) and; 23 7/8 x 19 in. (60.7 x 48.3cm) sheet: 29 1/4 x 23 7/8 in. (74.3 x 60.8cm) and; image: 19 x 23 3/4 in. (48.3 x 50.2cm) sheet: 24 1/2 x 29 in. (62.3 x 73.7cm) (3).
two monoprints LOUISE FISHMAN (american b. 1939) "ELK RIVER #59 AND #40" 2005, each pencil signed and dated, with full margins; Riverhouse Editions, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, publisher, and with their blindstamp. Two unique watercolor monoprints on wove paper. image: 19 3/4 x 25 in. (50.3 x 63.6cm) sheet: 24 1/4 x 28 7/8 in. (61.6 x 73.4cm) and; image: 18 3/4 x 23 5/8 in. (47.6 x 60cm) sheet: 24 1/4 x 28 7/8 in. (61.6 x 73.4cm) (2).
Louise Fishman American, b. 1939 Smuggler's Notch, 1986 Signed Louise Fishman, dated August 1986, and titled on the reverse Oil on linen 24 x 16 inches (61 x 40.6 cm) Provenance: Cheim & Read, New York Exhibited: New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial, Mar. 31-Jul. 5, 1987, B.I.87.112.1
