Independent, opinionated and talented, Perle Fine’s work spans 50 years of American painting, the so-called golden years from the early 1950s onward. She was one of the few women included in the seminal 9th Street Show, which heralded the dominance of the American Scene in art for the next five decades.

 

While still in her teens, Fine moved from her native Boston to New York City to study at the Art Students League with Kimon Nicolades. By the 1930’s her art was firmly anchored in the non-objective, and she joined the circle of Hans Hofmann and his art school. In the early 1940’s, while painting out of a cold water flat on New York’s 8th Street, Fine was one of the young talents and few women promoted by Hilla Rebay and the Guggenheim Museum. Fine’s first individual show was at the Willard Gallery in 1945, and in 1950 she was sponsored by Willem de Kooning and admitted as one of the first women members of the 8th Street Club.

 

In the 1950’s Fine moved to the Springs section of East Hampton on the eastern end of Long Island where she built her studio in that summer colony turned permanent residence for many artists of the New York School. Her years were filled with painting, individual shows, group shows, and teaching. In spite of a non-compromising personality and a distaste for the commercial realities of the art world, her work remains successful on its own merits.

 

One reviewer described her early work this way:

 "Perle Fine harnessed the allover, gestural liberties in Abstract Expressionism to create and then further explore transitional states of being as well as precipitous, shifting moods."

 

Fine had this to say about her work:

 

" I never thought of myself as a student or teacher, but as a painter. When I paint something I am very much aware of the future. If I feel something will not stand up 40 years from now, I am not interested in doing that kind of thing."

 

Fine’s work is represented in many important private and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.