Arts

Louise Fishman, Who Gave Abstract Expressionism a New Tone, Dies at 82


Louise Fishman, a widely exhibited artist who imbued her Abstract Expressionist paintings and other works with elements of feminism and gay and Jewish identity, died on July 26 in Manhattan. She was 82.

Her spouse, Ingrid Nyeboe, said the cause was complications of an ablation, a heart procedure.

Ms. Fishman continually explored new themes and techniques, usually giving her own spin to the male-dominated genre of Abstract Expressionism.

She was influenced early in her career by the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, men from the Jackson Pollock era, but by the mid-1960s she began to immerse herself in the gay and feminist movements, joining protest organizations like WITCH — the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell — and sharing ideas and frustrations with other women in a consciousness-raising group. It led her to rethink her art.

“One was the basketball court, basically a grid, and I knew where my foot was at all times in relation to the foul line and the half-court line,” she told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2019, when she had an exhibition at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. “Same thing when I would play bottle tops. You would make a court on the street with chalk, then get down on the street and shoot these bottle tops around these different boxes.”

She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as well as at the Tyler School of Art, part of Temple University. She earned bachelor’s degrees in painting and printmaking and in art education at Temple in 1963, then received a master’s degree in painting and printmaking at the University of Illinois at Champaign in 1965. She moved to New York that year, and was already well into Abstract Expressionism.

“I felt that Abstract Expressionist work was an appropriate language for me as a queer,” she said in an interview quoted in a catalog for a 2016 retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. “It was a hidden language, on the radical fringe, a language appropriate to being separate.”



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