26 Facts About Ethel Fisher

Ethel Fisher was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles.

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

Ethel 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, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Dallas Museum of Art, and Crocker Art Museum, among others.

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

Ethel Fisher Blankfield was born in 1923 in Galveston, Texas to Sam and Ada Blankfield.

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.

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

In 1947, Ethel 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.

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

Ethel Fisher 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.

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

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

Ethel Fisher had solo shows at the Lowe and Mirell galleries and Norton Museum of Art in Florida, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana, the Riverside Museum and Angeleski Gallery in New York, and Edward Dean Gallery.

Ethel Fisher participated in New York group shows at the Castagno, AM Sachs and Capricorn galleries, and Los Angeles shows at the Eugenia Butler and Margo Leavin galleries and LACMA.

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

Ethel Fisher's drawing 476 Broome Street was reproduced in the book Expressive Drawing, and her painting Santa Monica Bay was chosen for the cover of Hometown Santa Monica.

Ethel Fisher's work belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Crocker Art Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Lowe Gallery, Peabody College, and University of California at Los Angeles.

Ethel 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.

Ethel 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.

Ethel Fisher took evening lectures at the Art Students League with the well-known anatomy instructor, Robert Beverly Hale, and produced large works of simple, generalized figures with rounded Matisse-like bodies, depicted with loose brushwork, gestural line and strong color.

Ethel Fisher composed her figures against large color fields, as in Portrait of Will Barnet, which she considered a breakthrough figurative work.

Ethel Fisher spent the next seven years producing a body of architectural paintings and graphite drawings that embraced discipline and a restrictive palette.

Ethel Fisher was influenced by the work of Magritte and the late-19th-century cast-iron buildings of her youth in Galveston, with their Art Nouveau and Classical motifs.

Ethel Fisher eventually focused on monumental works that carefully record iconic, frontal views of ornate facades, sourced from black-and-white photographs of buildings in New York, Chicago, Galveston and St Louis.

Ethel Fisher appeared in the show, "Painting, Color, Form and Surface", along with Diebenkorn, Sam Francis and Ed Moses, all of whom were creating work that explored "painting as pure form" in contrast to the era's conceptual and fabricated art.