- Née:
- Ethel Kremer
- Born:
- May 20, 1903, New York, New York, U.S.
- Died:
- November 25, 1984, New York City (aged 81)
- Movement / Style:
- Abstract Expressionism
Ethel Schwabacher
-
Who was Ethel Schwabacher?
Ethel Schwabacher (1903–1984) was an American artist associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Though not as well-known as some of her contemporaries, her work can be found in major museum collections throughout the United States, and late 20th and early 21st century exhibitions have brought recognition to her talent and extensive body of work.
Schwabacher studied at the Art Students League and with artists Max Weber and Arshile Gorky. Her work was influenced by Surrealism and her own psychological analysis. Throughout her career, she explored themes such as fertility, grief, mythology, and social justice, and also published a monograph on Gorky.
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What kind of art did Ethel Schwabacher create?
Ethel Schwabacher, an American artist linked to Abstract Expressionism, created art that evolved through different styles and themes.
Schwabacher's work was influenced by Surrealism and her psychological analysis, which is reflected in her paintings from the late 1930s and 1940s. Throughout the 1950s, she created compositions related to fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth, including a series called Odes, which depicted her grief over her husband's death. Towards the end of the 1950s, she introduced figuration into her abstraction, painting compositions based on Greek mythical subjects. She also addressed the American civil rights movement in a series of paintings in 1963–64.
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Which art movement is Ethel Schwabacher associated with?
Ethel Schwabacher, an American artist, is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. While not as famous as some of her contemporaries, like Jackson Pollock, her work can be found in major museum collections throughout the United States. Throughout the 1950s, she created compositions related to fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth, and also a series of paintings called Odes, which depicted her grief at the death of her husband.
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How did Ethel Schwabacher’s life influence her artwork?
Ethel Schwabacher's life experiences profoundly shaped her artwork. Her early encounters with nature, studying with Max Weber, and her friendship with Arshile Gorky exposed her to surrealist techniques, which, combined with psychological analysis with Helene Deutsch, heavily influenced her paintings in the late 1930s and 1940s.
Her personal experiences with childbirth inspired her compositions related to fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth in the 1950s. Following her husband's death in 1951, she channeled her grief into a series of paintings called Odes. Later in her career, Schwabacher's identification with Greek tragedies and characters fueled compositions based on mythical subjects. She also addressed the American civil rights movement in her paintings of 1963–64.
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Can you name some well-known paintings by Ethel Schwabacher?
Ethel Schwabacher, an American artist associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement, created a significant body of work, though she was not as widely recognized as some of her contemporaries. Throughout the 1950s, Schwabacher explored themes of fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth, drawing from her personal experiences. Following her husband's death in 1951, she expressed her grief through a series of paintings called Odes. Towards the end of the 1950s, Schwabacher transitioned to incorporating figuration into her abstract works, creating compositions based on Greek mythical subjects such as Orestes, Sisyphus, Antigone, Prometheus, and Orpheus and Eurydice. In 1963–64, she addressed the American civil rights movement in a series of paintings.
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How did Ethel Schwabacher contribute to American art history?
Ethel Schwabacher, an American artist born in 1903, significantly contributed to the Abstract Expressionist movement. Although not as famous as some of her contemporaries, her work can be found in major American museum collections, and late 20th and early 21st-century exhibitions have recognized her talent.
Schwabacher's art was influenced by Surrealism and her psychoanalysis, particularly her paintings in the late 1930s and 1940s. She addressed personal experiences such as fertility and grief in series like Odes. Later, she incorporated figuration, drawing inspiration from Greek myths and, during the 1960s, the American civil rights movement.
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Ethel Schwabacher (born May 20, 1903, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 25, 1984, New York City) was an American artist associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Though not as well-known as her male peers or as Lee Krasner, Elaine DeKooning, or Helen Frankenthaler, her work is found in major museum collections throughout the United States, and exhibitions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries brought recognition to her talent and extensive body of work.
Kremer was raised in an affluent home in the Pelham suburb of New York City. She began painting and keeping a journal at an early age. Her first experiments in painting captured the flora and foliage in the garden of her family’s home. In 1918, at age 15, she began taking classes in sculpture at the Art Students League in New York City and had a brief apprenticeship with sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington in 1923. In 1927 Kremer turned from sculpture to painting and enrolled in a class with artist Max Weber at the League. That was also the year she met Surrealist artist Arshile Gorky, with whom she later studied and formed an important friendship and artistic relationship.
Kremer spent from 1928 to 1934 in Vienna and in the south of France. She painted and, having made an attempt on her own life in 1927, underwent intensive psychological analysis in Vienna with Helene Deutsch, a colleague of Sigmund Freud’s. When she returned to New York City, she met and soon married lawyer Wolf Schwabacher, who proved to be a nurturing partner, both emotionally and professionally. In 1934 Ethel Schwabacher reconnected with Gorky, with whom she took private lessons and learned the Surrealist technique of automatism. The Surrealist practice of mining the subconscious for material combined with her personal experience in analysis were the overriding influences in her paintings of the late 1930s and the 1940s. Gorky’s suicide in 1948 was a tremendous blow for Schwabacher. In 1951 she contributed to the catalogue for the Gorky retrospective held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and nine years after his death she published the first monograph on him.
Throughout the 1950s she painted compositions related to fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth, inspired by her own experience of giving birth in 1936 and in 1941. She created a series of paintings called Odes, which depicted her immense grief at the untimely death of her husband in 1951. She attempted suicide again in 1952 but, after she emerged from a coma brought on by that atttempt, she began painting again and continued psychological treatment. In 1953 she had a solo exhibition of Odes and other works at the well-known Betty Parsons Gallery, where many of the most successful Abstract Expressionists and colour-field painters had found representation.
Toward the very end of the 1950s, still working with abstraction but now introducing figuration as well, Schwabacher began painting compositions based on Greek mythical subjects such as Orestes, Sisyphus, Antigone, Prometheus, and a series based on Orpheus and Eurydice. Her extensive journal writing shows she identified strongly with those stories, tragedies, and characters. She addressed the American civil rights movement in a series of paintings of 1963–64. When her work was deemed too political by Parsons, Schwabacher found representation at the Greenross Gallery instead. She continued her mythic and also biblical scenes throughout the 1960s and began a small-scale series titled My Parnassus in the early 1970s, portraits of famous people such as Freud and Gorky. In 1974 she published a book on her friend, the artist John Ford. Though severe arthritis forced her to stop painting in the mid-1970s, she dictated into a tape recorder and sometimes wrote a journal of her thoughts on art and the creative process, selections of which were published in Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (1993).