The Human Comedy: Prints and Drawings by Isabel Bishop

Isabel Bishop (American, 1902-1988) arrived in New York in 1918 hoping to become an illustrator, but the energy and spirit of the city inspired her to create art based on her experience there. At the Art Students League, she studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, and Guy Pène du Bois, whose influences she assimilated into her own work. Together these artists, referred to collectively as the Fourteenth Street School, continued the earlier Ashcan School tradition of realistically portraying everyday life. The Union Square neighborhood provided them with an endless spectacle of life, populated by movie theaters, bank employees, shop girls, students, and vagrants. Over the course of her career, Bishop’s interest shifted from workday social interactions to more abstracted scenes of New Yorkers moving about on the streets and in the subways. The prints and drawings in this exhibition, selected from the permanent collection of the Harnett Print Study Center, represent different stages of the artist’s creative career.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website