American (1903-2000)

 Janice Biala was a Polish-born American painter known in Paris and New York for her sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. During her eight-decade career, her work was characterized by a modernist reinterpretation of classical themes of landscapes, still-life, and portraiture, animated gesturally with punctuated brush work held fast by her keen eye for observation. She was the sister of the artist Jack Tworkov, and her first husband was the writer Ford Madox Ford.  Her work can be found in numerous museum collections including the Chicago Institute of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, the Pompidue and the High Museum, among others.

As an immigrant arriving from a Russian-occupied Poland to a Jewish tenement house on the Lower East Side in New York in 1913, Biala, then Janice Tworkov, faced a new culture and adolescence at the same time. Decamping to Greenwich Village with her older brother Jack,  she became immersed in a bohemian life. While visiting an exhibition of French painting at the Brooklyn Museum in the Spring of 1921, Janice discovered the work of Cézanne. She enrolled in classes at the Art Students League and the School of the National Academy of Design. In the fall of 1922, Janice came upon the work of Edwin Dickinson who inspired her, in the summer of 1923, to hitchhike to Provincetown to study with him.

During a fateful trip to Paris in 1930, Biala met and fell in love with the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. A formidable figure among writers, artists and the transatlantic intelligentsia, Ford introduced Biala to the many artists within his circle forging a new Modernism in France including Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Upon Ford’s death in 1939, she fled Europe under the growing Nazi threat.  After the war and thereafter she would travel back and forth to France and spend long periods of time there.

In April 1950 in New York City, Biala was one of only three women—the other two were Louise Bourgeois and Hedda Sterne—invited to attend a private and exclusive discussion known as the Artist’s Session at Studio 35. The Whitney Museum of American Art became the first public institution to acquire Biala’s work in 1955.

In June 1989, The New York Times published “Three Who Were Warmed by the City of Light” by Michael Brenson featuring Biala, Joan Mitchell and Shirley Jaffe. Upon her death in 2000, NYT art critic Robert Smith wrote:  "[Her art] spanned two art capitals and several generations […] belonging to a trans-Atlantic tradition that included French painters like Matisse, Bonnard and Marquet, as well as Milton Avery and Edward Hopper."

One critic wrote of her work:  "Moving seemingly intuitively between abstraction and representation, the synthesis of elements from both the School of Paris and New York Abstract Expressionism is unmistakable."