Janice Biala

Janice Biala (September 11, 1903 – September 24, 2000) was a Polish-born American artist whose work, spanning seven decades, is well regarded both in France and the United States.

Her work lies between figuration and abstraction.

A modernist, she transformed her subjects into shape and color using "unexpected color relationships and a relaxed approach to interpreting realism."

In 1903 Biala was born in Biała Podlaska, a small city in the Kingdom of Poland with an important Imperial Russian garrison.

Her birth name was Schenehaia Tworkovska.

She immigrated to New York in 1913, arriving with her mother, Esther, and brother, Yakov (Jacob).

Her father, Hyman Tworkovsky, was a tailor who had emigrated New York earlier.

Biala's parents changed their surname to Bernstein because a relative whom they listed as sponsor on their immigration documents bore that name.

The family also Americanized its forenames.

Biala, whose Hebrew name was Schenehaia, became Janice and Yakov became Jack.

Jack would later change his surname to a simplified form of the original family name and, using that name, Jack Tworkov, would establish himself as a highly regarded painter of the New York School.

During the 1920s Biala had painted using the name Janice Tworkov.

Soon after the close of the G.R.D. exhibition in February she changed her name to Biala.

She adopted the new name on advice from her friend and fellow Provincetown painter, William Zorach, in order to avoid confusion with her brother Jack.

She had been supporting herself with a series of low paying jobs and when the G.R.D. shows had not produced sales of her work she accepted an invitation from her friend, Eileen Lake to accompany her on a trip to Paris.

There, on May 1, she met the author, Ford Madox Ford.

and in the summer of 1923 she convinced her brother Jack to accompany her to the artist colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in order to study with Hawthorne and Dickinson.

During 1924 and 1925 she studied at Manhattan's Art Students League where Hawthorne was then teaching.

In 1924 Dickinson made a portrait of her which shows a serious young woman, somberly dressed.

Despite differences of medium and treatment, Biala's self-portrait of 1925 shows similarities of style.

From Dickinson, Biala learned to focus on the essential elements of a subject, to see these elements as abstract forms on the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, and to select the color values that would become the key to the finished work.

Dickinson recognized that color relationships are more important to the artist than single colors in isolation.

As he did, she painted figuratively but she believed color harmonies to be more important than accurate representation of a subject.

Their compositions tended toward bold, simplified shapes and were more reductively abstract and spatially flat than those of many of their contemporaries.

Following her brother's lead, Janice Bernstein became Janice Tworkov and, in 1929, was naturalized as a U.S. citizen with that name.

Biala was educated in New York's public school system.

At an early age she decided to become a professional artist and, during her high school years, she and friends got together for informal sketching sessions.

When she was twenty she enrolled at the National Academy of Design's art course where Charles Hawthorne was teaching a life drawing class.

At this time she also met Hawthorne's associate, Edwin Dickinson, who was teaching a class at the Art Students League.

In 1929 and 1930 Biala participated in group shows at the G.R.D. Salon.

G.R.D. was one of a few New York galleries that showed modernist paintings of both women and men.

It was a non-profit gallery named in honor of Gladys Roosevelt Dick by her sister, Jean S. Roosevelt.

Along with Biala's paintings, the 1929 show included works by E. Madeline Shiff, Virginia Parker, and E. Nottingham.

In a review that appeared in The New York Times, Lloyd Goodrich noted her fine feeling for colors and commented that her work showed similarities to the fauvist paintings of André Derain.

This remark shows prescience since it was Derain's fellow fauvist, Henri Matisse, about whom she would later write "I have always had Matisse in my belly."

The 1930 show, assembled by Agnes Weinrich, contained works by Provincetown artists, including Charles Demuth, Oliver Chaffee, Karl Knaths, William and Lucy L'Engle, Niles Spencer, Marguerite and William Zorach, as well as ones by Biala and her brother Jack.

Although they did not marry, the two became inseparable, living and working together until Ford's death in 1939.

Less than half Ford's age, she was vigorous, ambitious, and gradually becoming more confident in her ability as an artist.

In contrast, he continued to write prolifically but his best work was behind him and his health was declining.

The two of them endured dire financial straits, often raising their own vegetables in a kitchen garden attached to the villa they rented near Toulon.