Perle Fine

Perle Fine (born Poule Feine) (1905–1988) was an American Abstract expressionist painter.

Fine's work was most known by its combination of fluid and brushy rendering of the materials and the use of biomorphic forms encased and intertwined with irregular geometric shapes.

One of six children, Fine was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1905, to parents who had recently immigrated from Russia.

She became interested in art at a young age.

"Starting almost immediately in grammar school at the time of the First World War... I did posters and started winning little prizes and getting encouragement that way. So that by the time I graduated from high school I knew very well I wanted to be an artist."

Fine briefly went to the School of Practical Art in Boston, where she took classes in illustration and graphic design and learned to design newspaper advertisements.

She paid for her studies by working in the school's bursar's office.

Subsequently, she moved to New York City to pursue training in fine art and began attending the Grand Central School of Art.

It was at the Grand Central School of Art where Fine met Maurice Berezov, whom she married in 1930.

While in New York, she also studied at the Art Students League with Kimon Nicolades.

In the late 1930s she began to study with Hans Hofmann in New York City as well as in Provincetown.

During a show at the Nienrendorf Gallery, art critic Edward Alden Jewell, who had previously dismissed abstraction when it first came out in the 1930s by calling it decorative and imitative of European avant-garde, praised Fine's "aplomb" and "native resourcefulness".

Fine ran the East River Gallery on East 57th Street from 1936 to 1938, and opened her own gallery in 1940.

"By the mid 1940s, Fine had work in the collections of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Crowninshield... her art was also owned by Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Emily Hall and Burton Tremaine, the modern art collectors from Connecticut."

Emily Hall Tremaine would later commission Fine to create two interpretations of Piet Mondrian's unfinished painting Victory Boogie Woogie.

In 1943 she received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and was able to participate in exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery and the Museum of Nonobjective Painting; these shows brought her significant press attention.

In 1945, Fine joined American Abstract Artists, where she found community and support for her artistic ideas.

In 1945, she had her first solo exhibit at the Willard Gallery on East 57th Street.

In 1946, Fine accepted an offer to work for Karl Nienrendorf, whose gallery was across the street from the Willard Gallery; it was at this gallery that Fine received a subsidy that enabled her to paint full-time.

In 1947, Fine was featured in an issue of The New Iconograph which showcased nonobjective art and theory.

It was written that, even though she was a member of American Abstract Artists, her work was different in spirit than that of fellow-members Ralston Crawford and Robert Motherwell.

In 1950 she was admitted to the 8th Street "Artists' Club", having been nominated by Willem de Kooning.

"Beginning in the mid-1950s, Fine's expressionist style began to loosen. She produced thick, heavily painted abstractions using harsh, jagged strokes with a loaded brush. Her focus was the two-dimensional plane: surface, texture and medium. Fine's palette in these often large-scale pieces was one of much more somber tones."

In the 1950s, Fine moved to the Springs section of East Hampton on the eastern end of Long Island, where Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Conrad Marca-Relli, John Ferren, and other members of the New York School found permanent residence.

Fine was chosen by her fellow artists to participate in the Ninth Street Show held from May 21 – June 10, 1951.

Starting with the Ninth Street Show, Fine participated in each of the invitational New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals from 1951 to 1957.

She was one of just 24 out of a total 256 New York School artists who was included in all the Annuals.

These Annuals were important because the participants were chosen by the artists themselves.

Other women artists who took part in all the shows were Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell.

At a 1958 exhibition, her paintings offered "abstract intimations of nature... This perception was reinforced by Fine's inclusion in Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to Nature in Twentieth-Century American Art."

The show was located at 60 East 9th Street on the first floor and in the basement of a building which was about to be demolished.

According to Bruce Altshuler:

"The artists celebrated not only the appearance of the dealers, collectors and museum people on the 9th Street, and the consequent exposure of their work, but they celebrated the creation and the strength of a living community of significant dimensions."

The 1960s marked her re-entry into a profoundly changed New York art scene, in which she encountered more galleries and new art styles.

"Fine had 4 solo shows at the Graham Gallery (1961, 1963, 1964, 1967) with a major shift in her style, with a reintroduction of horizontals and verticals, announced Fine's intention to convey... 'an emotion about color'."

Fine began to teach in 1961, as a visiting critic and lecturer at Cornell University.

Soon after, Hofstra University approached her with an offer; she taught there privately from 1962 to 1973.

Fine stated the following:

In 1965, she developed a severe case of mononucleosis.

Around this time, she took up making wood collages, employing curvilinear forms.