Ethel Fisher

Ethel Fisher (née Blankfield; 1923–2017) was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles.

Her work ranges across abstraction and representational genres including large-scale portraiture, architectural "portraits," landscape and still-life, and is unified by a sustained formal emphasis on color and space.

Ethel Blankfield was born in 1923 in Galveston, Texas to Sam and Ada (Zax) Blankfield.

She rented a studio with Ilse Getz in a loft building at 30 East 14th Street overlooking Union Square; the building was occupied at various times by artists Virginia Admiral, Carl Ashby, Robert De Niro Sr., Edwin Dickinson and Harry Sternberg.

Here, Fisher turned her attention back to figurative work, countering contemporary movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop, which dominated the New York art scene.

At the end of the decade, Fisher and Kott left New York and rented a property in the Hollywood Hills next door to the home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski just weeks before the Manson murders took place.

Their account of that night was published in several books about the murders.

She studied art from 1939 to 1943 at the University of Houston, University of Texas and Washington University in St. Louis, under Howard Cook, William McVey and B.J.O. Nordfeldt, among others.

After studying at the Art Students League in the 1940s, Fisher found success as an abstract artist in Florida in the late 1950s, and began exhibiting her work nationally and in Havana, Cuba.

Her formative work of this period embraced the history of art, architecture and anthropology; she referred to it as "abstract impressionist" to distinguish her approach to form and color from that of Abstract Expressionism.

While teaching art to servicemen in San Antonio during World War II, she met Gene Fisher, whom she married in St. Louis in 1943.

Later that year, the couple moved to New York City, where Fisher attended the Art Students League on scholarship, with classmates including Ilse Getz, Edith Schloss and Henry C. Pearson.

She studied there with Morris Kantor and New York School painter Will Barnet, who became a lifelong friend.

In 1947, Fisher gave birth to her first daughter, Sandra, in New York.

The Fishers moved to Miami in 1948, where Ethel installed a studio in the family home and a second daughter, Margaret, was born; Margaret Fisher is a performance and media artist and writer, married to composer and new music conductor Robert Hughes.

She had solo shows at the Lowe and Mirell galleries (1954) and Norton Museum of Art (1958) in Florida, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana (1957), the Riverside Museum (1958) and Angeleski Gallery (1960) in New York, and Edward Dean Gallery (1961, San Francisco).

Fisher is best known for her portraits of fellow artists from the 1960s, and for grid-like, architectural paintings of the facades of urban cast-iron buildings, from the 1970s.

Her figurative work employs color fields and architectural details as abstract shapes to create tension between her subjects and their surroundings and impart psychological depth.

Her later, carefully rendered interiors and still lifes often include reproductions of works by well-known artists.

Fisher's work was written about in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, ARTnews and Artweek, and belongs to the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Crocker Art Museum, among others.

Fisher began her professional career as an early-modernist-influenced abstract artist, before turning to portraiture in the 1960s, architectural paintings in the 1970, and landscapes and still lifes in her late career.

In 1961, Ethel Fisher left Miami and her family to concentrate on her painting.

After travelling in Europe for a year, she resettled in Manhattan with her second husband, art historian Seymour Kott.

She contributed to group shows at The Lyceum (Havana), the Museum of Modern Art, Ringling Museum of Art, Art U.S.A., and nationally touring shows from the Florida Artist Group and Ford Foundation / de Young Museum ("Cubism Now and Expressionism in the West," 1961).

While Fisher found many exhibition opportunities, she was not taken on by a New York gallery, a circumstance she attributed to a professional climate that often rejected women artists.

After moving to New York City in 1962, Fisher returned to figurative work and began working with collage on paper.

She participated in New York group shows at the Castagno, A.M. Sachs and Capricorn ("Artists by Artists" show) galleries, and Los Angeles shows at the Eugenia Butler and Margo Leavin galleries and LACMA ("The Contained Object," 1967).

Following her move to the West Coast in 1969, Fisher began the body of work for which she is best known, the building paintings, which previewed in a group show at Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art ("Current Concerns," 1975, curated by Walter Hopps) and received a solo showing the same year at the Mitzi Landau Gallery.

In 1971, they bought a 1926, multi-level Spanish Colonial home on a slope above the Pacific Ocean in Pacific Palisades; its architecture and ocean and mountain views appear in many of Fisher's paintings.

The Los Angeles Times Home magazine featured the house and Fisher's decorating and paintings in a 1974 spread.

Fisher was featured, along with Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Betye Saar and others, in "Video Interviews of 27 California Artists" (1976), produced for Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York.

By the end of the decade, Fisher was again painting the figure and showing her work in "California Figurative Painters" (1977, Tortue Gallery), which included Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, and "Portraits/1979" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

Sandra Fisher would emigrate to London, where she was included in the first School of London show, "The Human Clay," and married the painter R. B. Kitaj in 1983.

Later exhibitions include a solo show at Michael Ivey Gallery (1986) and the group shows "Portraits" (American Jewish University, 2003) and "Revealing and Concealing: Portraits and Identity" (Skirball Cultural Center, 2000), which included works by Eleanor Antin, Kitaj, and Warhol.

Her drawing 476 Broome Street was reproduced in the book Expressive Drawing (1989), and her painting Santa Monica Bay was chosen for the cover of Hometown Santa Monica (2007).

Her work belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Crocker Art Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Lowe Gallery (University of Miami), Peabody College, and University of California at Los Angeles.

Fisher's papers are in the collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in New York and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.

She died in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles in 2017, at age 94.

She continued to work in her studio until her death in 2017, after which the house was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fisher exhibited widely while based in Miami.