Background
Schwabacher was born in New York in 1903.
Schwabacher was born in New York in 1903.
She attended Horace Mann School and at age 15 enrolled at the Art Students League of New New York She also studied sculpture at the National Academy of Design until 1921.
She was also the author of a monograph on the artist John Ford and a memoir, "Hungry for Light". Her family moved to Pelham in 1908 where she first began painting in her garden. During 1921, Arnold Genthe took several photographs of her.
After her apprenticeship in stone carving with the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, in 1927 Schwabacher abandoned sculpture and enrolled in Max Weber"s painting class at the Art Students League.
That year she met Arshile Gorky, with whom she developed a lasting friendship. She lived in Europe from 1928 to 1934.
She and Gorky took independent studies together between 1934 and 1936. Gorky introduced her to automatism.
She was inspired by Gorky"s biomorphic abstractions and erotic forms.
In the 1930s she began to explore her own sub-conscious, combining automatism with abstract forms, referring to nature. and had two children, Brenda Webster, American critic and novelist, and Christopher Schwabacher a lawyer in New New York She died on November 25, 1984. Schwabacher"s work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Rockefeller University in New York City.
Her work has been exhibited in a number of galleries, including the Anita Shapolsky Gallery, the Betty Parsons Gallery and the Green-Ross Gallery in New York City.