Ethel Schwabacher

Ethel Kremer Schwabacher (b. New York 1903-1984) was a protege of Arshile Gorky, his first biographer, and herself a well-known abstract expressionist painter.

Schwabacher was born in New York in 1903. Her family moved to Pelham in 1908 where she began painting in the garden.

She attended Horace Mann School and at age 15 enrolled at the Art Students League of New York. She also studied sculpture at the National Academy of Design until 1921. During 1921, Arnold Genthe took several photographs of her.

In 1923, after her apprenticeship in stone carving with the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Schwabacher abandoned sculpture in 1927 and enrolled in Max Weber's painting class at the Art Students League. That year she met Arshile Gorky, with whom she developed a life lasting friendship.

She lived in Europe from 1928 to 1934. She and Gorky took independent studies together between 1934 and 1936. Gorky introduced her to automatism. She was inspired by Gorky's surrealistic-inspired imaginary, biomorphic abstractions and erotic forms. Synchronously, her cousin George Oppen was in New York City where he became a central member of the Objectivist group of poets that flourished there in the 1930s. Decades later, Oppen won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

In 1934, she married the prominent entertainment lawyer Wolf Schwabacher. She began to explore her own sub-conscious, combining automatism with abstract forms, referring to nature. Schwabacher often interconnected themes of womanhood, childbirth and children.

Following the death of her husband, she expressed her personal traumas through the Greek myths. She died on November 25, 1984.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Rockefeller University in New York City are homes for some of her work.

ee also

*Bodley Gallery

References

*"Ethel Schwabacher: The Lyric/Epic and the Personal", Judith E. Johnson, Jayne L. Walker, Brenda S. Webster, "Woman's Art Journal", Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1989) , pp. 3-9
*"Arshile Gorky" by Ethel Kremer Schwabacher (New York: Macmillan, 1957)
* Schwabacher, Ethel; Jeanne Reynal; Bodley Gallery (New York, N.Y.) [http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/48706042?tab=holdings "Of people : Ethel Schwabacher, pastels : Jeanne Reynal, mosaics."] (New York : Bodley Gallery, 1976) OCLC: 48706042
*"Hungry For Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher", edited by Brenda S. Webster and Judith Emylyn Johnson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993)