Perle Fine

Background

Perle Fine was born in 1905 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Her parents, Simon and Sarah Fine, immigrated to the United States from Russia.

Education

Fine briefly went to School of Practical Art in Boston, where she learned to design newspaper advertisements, before going the New York City to briefly attend Grand Central School of Art. While in New York, she also studied at the Art Students League with Kimon Nicolades. In the late 1930s she began to study with Hans Hofmann in New York City as well as in Provincetown.

Career

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. Active in the modern art scene from the 1930’s until the year of her passing in 1988, Fine's creativity explored and reworked several abstract styles and ideas, but always emphasized her ability to produce a certain harmony on canvas.

During the early 1940s, Fine joined the American Abstract Artists where she met Piet Mondrian. Fine, so familiar with Mondrian’s theories of Neo-Plasticism and his aesthetics was also fortunate to have observed him painting in his studio. Perhaps one of the most and distinguishing moments in her career was a commission by Emily Tremaine to make two interpretations of Mondrian’s "Victory Boogie Woogie", a painting left unfinished at his death in 1944.

Fine was actively showing her work at galleries and exhibitions in New York and abroad, and was associated with several arts organizations. By 1943, she was affiliated with Hilla Rebay and the Museum for Non-Objective Painting. She was also a Guggenheim scholar, exhibiting with artist as such as Ilya Bolotowsky and Ad Reinhardt. Her work was represented in many important venues including the Boston Institute of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and the Spring Salon for Young Artists at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century. Fine's first solo show occurred in 1945 with Marian Willard, and between 1947 - 1949 was represented by Karl Nierendorf. After the Nierendorf Gallery closing she signed with Betty Parsons, one of the earliest and most prominent New York galleries associated with Abstract Expressionism.

Fine's artwork during the 1940s and 50s touched upon various mediums and abstract styles. She worked in oil, gouache, etching and collage, using materials such as paper, newsprint and sand. Her pictures entertain organically inspired shapes and amorphic forms that seem to float - either painted or collaged over a background.

Beginning in the med-1950’s, Fine's expressionist style began to loosen. In 1950, with the sponsorship and support of her friend, Willem de Kooning, Fine became a member of the 8th Street Club – an informal weekly discussion group held for artists and art critics including William Baziotes, Franz Kline, Leo Castelli, and Clement Greenberg. In addition, she exhibited annually with the American Abstract Artists, and also the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.

The final creative segment of Perle Fine's life took shape during the mid-1960s. She became interested in the repetitive rhythm and geometry of the grid. In addition to her artwork, Fine taught at Hofstra University during the 1960s and was also a visiting critic and lecturer at Cornell University. Her final solo exhibition was held at Guild Hall in East Hampton in 1978, entitled "Perle Fine: Major Works 1958 - 1978." She died of pneumonia on May 31, 1988, at the age of 83 in East Hampton, New York.

Achievements

• Fine was most known by her combination of fluid and brushy rendering of the materials and her use of biomorphic forms encased and intertwined with irregular geometric shapes.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Black on Yellow

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • "Cool" Series No. 2 (Yellow over Tan)

  • Accordment Series #17

  • Oblique Reference

  • Lair

  • Pale Gold - Grey

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • "Cool" Series (Black over Green)

  • Encounter aka Brouhaha 3

  • Pure Myth

  • Blue-Chip Blue #1

  • The Big Splash (aka Tantrum I)

  • "Cool" Series No. 9 (Gibraltar)

  • A Timeless Moment

  • "Cool" Series No. 80 (Impatient Spring)

  • An Accordment #73

  • Sunblinded

  • Ceremony of a Kind

  • Unequivocably Blue

  • Plan for the White City

  • A Near Distance

  • Untitled (Developed Idea)

  • The Roaring Wind

  • "Cool" Series No. 46 (Spanking Fresh)

  • Soft Neon

  • Line and Color Interwoven

  • Untitled

  • "Cool" Series (Blue over Red)

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Prescience No. 11

  • Surfscape #3

  • An Accordment #80

  • Undisciplined Emotion I

  • Untitled (for "Cool" Series)

  • Untitled

  • "Cool" Series No. 15 (The Very End)

  • "Cool" Series No. 12 (Fiercely Remote)

  • "Cool" Series No. 36 (Rough-Hewn)

  • Summer Studio #2

  • Untitled (Brown, Red, Green, White)

  • "Cool" Series (Dark Pink over Brown)

  • Untitled

  • Untitled (Prescience Series)

  • Ideomorphic Composition #1

  • "Cool" Series No. 26 (First Love)

  • "Cool" Series No. 22 (Wide U)

  • Accordment Series #15: On Its Way

  • Timelessness #2

  • Charcoal Red (Winter)

  • Tyranny of Space

  • "Cool" Series No. 29 (Cool Blue, Cold Green)

  • "Cool" Series No. 1 (Red over White)

  • "Cool" Series No. 7 (Square Shooter)

Views

Her work accentuated the beauty of rhythmic variations and the subtle nuances of color, line, shape and space.

Quotations: "My paintings, like my lithographs, deal not in definition, but rather with the art of evocation and suggestion. I strive at a certain simplicity by cutting away all the non-essential elements, and whatever calligraphy remains is only that necessary to qualify the forms and render a purer deeper emotion."

"I find that painting is still a great adventure, perhaps because I believe there is a universality in its ideals that makes it more than merely exciting."

"I work to evoke new depths of feeling and to enrich the world of painting as well."

"In my commitment to the world of abstract art, I propose to push forward beyond the known boundaries of art that evokes, rather than defines."

Membership

• American Abstract Artists

• Federation Modern Painters and Sculptors

• Guild Hall

• 8th Street Club

Personality

Perle had a non-compromising personality and a distaste for the commercial realities of the art world. Fine was an artist who focused on the doctrines of her movement, anxious to express on canvas her own firm belief in abstraction. It is a testament to her extraordinary passion and skill.

Interests

• Artists

  Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Connections

In 1930 Perle married Maurice Berezov.

Father:

Simon Fine

Mother:

Sarah Fine

Spouse:

Maurice Berezov

teacher:

Hans Hofmann

References

• Tranquil Power: The Art and Life of Perle Fine
  2005
• Perle Fine: the Cool Series
  2011
• Perle Fine: The Storm Departs.
  2007
• Trove A Collection of Works by Perle Fine June 24 - August 12, 2017
  2017
• Perle Fine: The Cool Series
• American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey With Artists' Statements, Artwork, and Biographies
  2003
• Perle Fine: Major Works, 1954-1978: A Selection of Drawings, Paintings, and Collages
  1978