B. Biala, Poland, 1903
D. Paris, France, 2000
Janice Biala was an American painter whose career bridged a transatlantic dialogue between European Modernism and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Her work was characterized by a gestural reinterpretation of classical themes of landscapes, still-life, and portraiture, animated with color and textured collage.
Biala, who made the name of her birthplace her own, immigrated from a Russian-occupied Poland to a Jewish tenement house on New York’s Lower East Side in 1913. She and her brother, Jack Tworkov, would both move to Greenwich Village, where they 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, leading her to enroll 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.
By late 1920, Biala was a frequent exhibitor at the G.R.D. Studios in New York and remained at the forefront of the fledgling art colonies of Provincetown, MA — where she studied under Edward Dickinson, the extent of her formal training — and Woodstock, New York, where she forged friendships with David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Lee Gatch, and William Zorach. During a trip to Paris in 1930, Biala met and fell in love with the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, who introduced her to the artists within his circle 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 rise of fascism.
During the second half of her career and marriage to Daniel “Alain” Brustlein, a noted illustrator for The New Yorker, Biala split their time between New York and her adopted city of Paris. Major themes dominating the early part of these final decades include large sweeping landscapes featuring the shores of Provincetown or the sea circling Venice. A return to the architecture of Paris appears in a series of major paintings focused on Notre Dame. Themes of interiors as well as a return to compositions inspired by Velázquez dominate these later years. Her work continued to meld abstraction with imagist concerns. She is represented in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, CO; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; MuseĢe National d'Arts Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others.
