From Publishers Weekly
Like her close friend Reginald Marsh, realist painter Isabel Bishop set down city street scenes in a quick, reportorial style. Her sketches and oils of working women from the 1930s and '40s can be read almost as a feminist statement. In her "Union Square" series and related vignettes of New York, Bishop, who died in 1988, captured odd or coarse facial expressions as well as the quiet dignity of ordinary people. Her self-portraits are striking, and her relaxed nudes, awash in color, are at once sensuous and ethereal. In an oil and tempera series of random, aloof walking figures done in the 1960s and '70s, Bishop integrates multiple points of view into one pictorial space, suggesting the terribly isolating tendencies of modern urban living. Novelist Yglesias has a sensitive eye in her sympathetic essay which pins down the artist's "piercingly loving" quality.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This multi-part work includes critic John Russell's generalized introduction, novelist Yglesias's 14-page essay based on seven interviews with Bishop before her death in February 1989, quotations from the artist accompanying works grouped by subject matter, and Linda Weintraub's art historical notes cataloging an exhibit of Bishop's drawings mounted by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Alliance. One of the first comprehensive looks at Bishop's works, this book uses some 175 illustrations, over 70 in color, to chart the progress of Bishop's painstaking oeuvre. In her own words, Bishop followed the old masters but offered an almost abstract conception of figures in motion. Not fully attuned to Bishop, Yglesias discounts Bishop's own statement that movement in her figures (and probably her whole complicated technique?) was "a metaphor of the possibility for social mobility in her subjects." Still, the book is recommended as a good introduction to Bishop.
- Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Goucher Coll., Md.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Goucher Coll., Md.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
