Joyce Reopel

Joyce Reopel (1933–2019) was an American painter, draughtswoman and sculptor who worked in pencil, aquatint, silver- and goldpoint, and an array of old master media.

Born in Worcester, MA in 1933, and raised in nearby Auburn, Reopel was the only child of homemaker Ada (née Anderson) and musician Ernest J. Reopel, Jr. A first cousin to scientist Paul Englund on her mother's side, Reopel was also a distant cousin to renowned French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, Grand Officer of the National Order of Québec, on her father's. In 1955, she married painter and fellow Worcester Art Museum School graduate Mel Zabarsky.

Her other professional endeavors included time spent teaching at the Swain School of Design, the University of New Hampshire and elsewhere.

Her earliest work can be seen in a 1953 version of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, which she illustrated and helped typeset as an art student.

In 1958, she created pen-and-ink cover illustrations for Boston's Audience: A Quarterly Review of Literature and the Arts in an issue featuring several of Anne Sexton's poems and interior illustration by Arthur Polonsky.

A Boris Mirski Gallery veteran, from 1959 to 1966, she was known for her refined skills and virtuosity.

She was also one of very few women in the early group of Boston artists that included fellow artist and husband Mel Zabarsky, Hyman Bloom, Barbara Swan, Jack Levine, Marianna Pineda, Harold Tovish and others who helped overcome Boston's conservative distaste for the avant-garde, occasionally female, and often Jewish artists later classified as Boston expressionists.

Unique to New England, Boston Expressionism has had lasting local and national influence, and is now in its third generation.

Known for her finely wrought detail and lush sensuality, New York Magazine called Reopel "an artisan as well as an artist", while praising her renderings of the figure because "[t]he artist seems consistently to search out that which lies behind the physical trait. And having discovered it, she presents it in whispers, with unusual understatement and economy."

The results range from expressive realism to subtle surrealism and outright grotesquerie.

A student of sculptor Leonard Baskin at the Worcester Art Museum School, then known as the "Mini-Met", Reopel shared his fascination with the human form, and his interest in fine arts printing, woodcut, sculpture, etching and typography.

She also designed many of the catalogues for her 1960s and 1970s aquatint, silver- and goldpoint exhibitions at Boston's Boris Mirski Gallery and, in New York, the Corber Gallery and founder Bella Fishco's Forum Gallery.

As Reopel's work matured, its subtly emotive, even melancholy, rendering of its subjects, were often lyrical in the vein of fellow Boston Expressionist Arthur Polonsky.

Her distinctive palette evolved from Glints of silver, gold and lead-gray in the early years to subtle tones of grayed blue and green when she turned to oil painting.

Her old-master technical skill, meanwhile, reflected an interest in history that was also sometimes reflected in her depictions of historical themes or classical icons.

A graduate of the Worcester Art Museum School, Reopel also spent two years studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford University.

Earning recognition and laudits for her work, Reopel was the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at the Bunting Institute (since renamed the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard) and a grant as a Radcliffe Scholar for Independent Study; a fellowship to Yale Norfolk School of Art; a grant then under Princeton's aegis at the National Institute of Arts & Letters (NIAL); a Ford Foundation grant in sculpture and drawing; the American Academy of Arts & Letters Arts & Letters Award; and a research grant from Wheaton College.

Reopel (Zabarsky), Joyce:

In 1976, her life-long interest in politics helped win her a two-year term in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

A respect for history and passion for architecture led to her interest in preservation, the documented history of her own house, and the founding of the Portsmouth Historic District Commission.