Isabel Bishop

NY: Rizzoli, 1988. Hardcover. VG/VG. Beige cloth with black lettering. Glossy white dj with color image. 180 pp. 70 color, 175 bw plates. This handsome book, whose illuminating text and commentaries are by novelist Helen Yglesias, brings together for the first time all of Isabel Bishop's major works. The illustrations are grouped by motif: The Early Work, Self-Portraits, Nudes, The People of Union Square, and The Walking Pictures. More than 70 excellent full-color reproductions capture the immediacy, luminosity, and Baroque grandeur of the paintings; and the black-and white reproductions of over 175 drawings and etchings reveal Bishop's extraordinarily masterful draftsmanship. Also included in this comprehensive monograph is an afterword by Linda Weintraub, director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, that discusses Isabel Bishop's graphic work; a selected bibliography; and listings of exhibitions, collections, and awards and honors. Some of the most memorable, expressive, and satisfying images of American women are found in Isabel Bishop's art. Long recognized as an astute observer of life in and around New York's Union Square, Bishop, who died in 1988, has more recently been praised for her conspicuous empathy with women and her subtle depiction of timely - and timeless - feminine themes. John Russell, chief art critic of The New York Times, who has contributed an insightful foreword to the book, commented in a review in 1975 that Bishop "has a novelist's eye for idiosyncracies of anatomy, dress and social behavior." Thus it is apropos that, in these pages, the life and artistic career of this compassionate chronicler of big-city life unfold through the insights of an author who is herself a novelist.