Artist Information

Isabel Bishop


United States
1902 - 1988

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Isabel Bishop was born in 1902 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was raised in Detroit, Michigan. In 1918, Bishop moved to New York to pursue a career as an illustrator. She enrolled in the School of Applied Design for Women, but in 1920 she transferred to the Art Students League in order to study painting. Rather than take commissions, Bishop leased out her own studio in Union Square in 1934 and began to paint her own experiences in the city. By this time, she had already begun to garner recognition for her figure drawings and was regarded as one of the urban realists of the “Fourteenth Street School,” a reference to the area in which she, and artists such as the Soyer brothers, lived and painted.

During the 1950s and ‘60s, Bishop took to drawing female nudes, calling back to a series she had done in the 1930s and ‘40s which depicted female faces in unexpected situations such as touching up a blemish. Bishop is very well known for her works depicting women, as well as her scenes of urban life. She died in 1988 in the Riverdale neighborhood of New York.

Madison Duran ‘20
September 2019

Sources:
“Isabel Bishop.” Smithsonian American Art Museum,
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/isabel-bishop-427.
“Isabel Bishop.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isabel-Bishop.
“Isabel Bishop - Bio.” The Phillips Collection,
https://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/bios/bishop-bio.htm.
“Isabel Bishop.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Oct. 2019,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Bishop.