Inside: Raleigh on Film; Lille on Dance; Franklin on Social Media; Tobey on Isabel Bishop; Steiner on 'Huh? Say what?'; Steiner on Selling Art Seckel on a road trip: Los Angeles to Seattle; McCullough on Designing an Arts District; Caster on Musicals; New Art Books; Short Fiction & Poetry; Extensive Calendar of Cultural Events…and more!
Vol. 32
No. 3
Winter 2015/16
(Dec/Jan/Feb)
Isabel Bishop’s New Vision:
Social Mobility Beyond the Separate Spheres By Rena Tobey ©2015 Isabel Bishop (1902-1988) developed her artistic voice during the Depression, when rigid gender roles and the Separate Sphere ideology were breaking down. She moved to New York at 16 to become a professional artist and made her reputation depicting an emerging sub-genre of the ‘New Woman’—the ‘Career Girl’ in the public sphere, specifically, the ‘Office Girl’ who worked at Union Square. During the Depression, Union Square blended office workers, the unemployed and homeless, social activists and soapbox orators, shoppers, and crowds gathered for political rallies. Bishop maintained a studio in various locations around the Square for fifty years. She watched the melee from her studio window and also mingled in the Square, sketchbook in hand. She, along with 3 male colleagues, including her teacher Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876-1952), became known as the ‘14th Street School’, named for one bordering street. Coming from a poor family herself, Bishop had sympathy for the unemployed men who passed their days at the Square, as well as for the Office Girls. She depicted those young women with dignity, in their cheaplymade clothes, aspiring to the upward mobility of a white-collar position or socially-improving marriage. With four banks, insurance and electric companies, department stores, and many small organizations, Union Square businesses generated 10,000 clerical positions. These jobs served as a major source of employment for single and, increasingly, married women during the Depression. Although married women were criticized for taking jobs from men for miniscule pay, overall these wageearners were considered exemplars of independent womanhood. Both single and married working women were often saviors of their families,
when unemployment reached 25%, and many men could no longer find any kind of work. Rather than victims of poverty, the working woman became a symbol for women’s place in the larger world. As with other occupations, as more women became clerical workers, men abandoned the positions, long an entry point for climbing the organizational ladder. With the invention of the typewriter, the work became more routinized and feminized, no longer offering a responsible starting point for a larger career. But Bishop perceived these young women’s fate differently. She believed in upward social mobility, using imagery of the Office Girl to demonstrate that possibility. In the 1930s, she made a series of works focusing on young women at lunch time. She depicts them attired in “their cheap rayon dresses” (Bishop, in an oral history), who used their lunch hour to create a kind of domestic-sphere intimacy in the modern urban environment. They ignore the viewer, taking a respite from their pressured day and being “bossed around” by men at work. Bishop also shows viewers how these young women just entering the workplace start to grow up. Now the Office Girl has been promoted, as seen in Young Woman from 1937. She displays polish, decorum, and grace, dressed in a tailored, smart business suit, boldly and assuredly striding forward into the public sphere. This is a woman with things to say and places to go, well beyond the domestic. She aspires to more, to bigger, to better, an equal in confidence and competence with any man. Bishop demonstrated her own competence with her meticulous technique. Like her teacher Miller, she reflected her interest in Renaissance art by working in those traditional
Isabel Bishop
Each Month visit arttimesjournal.com for new essays, videos, calendar & opportunity listings
CSS Publications, Inc. PO Box 730 Mt. Marion, NY 12456-0730
Support the Arts; Enrich your Life
www.arttimesjournal.com 845-246-6944
Subscribe to ART TIMES
Continued on page 7
ART-LITERATURE-DANCE-MUSIC-EXHIBITIONS-THEATRE-FILM-ART-LITERATURE-DANCE-MUSIC