Elise Asher: The Vintage Years, Paintings from 1958–70 by Eric Firestone Gallery

Elise Asher: The Quicksilver of the Life

by Amy Rahn

In a statement addressed to artists in the Feminist Art Program, Elise Asher (1914–2004) wrote that, having started out a poet, she had been “able to relive and relieve to a great degree my special woman-fears and frustrations through my poems,” and thus “could come to painting a much freer individual—concerning myself with making something speak beyond resentment and the politics of gender.” 1 Seemingly liberated from the so-called woman problem, she felt free to “try,” as she put it, “with an intimate calligraphy to register the quicksilver of the life.”

The twenty-eight years between Asher’s beginnings as a painter in 1947 and her statement in 1975 included works ranging from entirely abstract gestural paintings to lyrical paintings combining poems and gestural abstraction, and works on Plexiglas and in/on glass containers and books. When Asher created her paintings combining legible poems and painted forms after 1962, they marked a synthesis of the two halves of her creative life—poetry and painting—that had earlier divided into disciplines and careers as first a poet, and then a painter. Balanced between the ascendence of the New York School of painters and poets most celebrated from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, and the emergence of assemblage, pop, and conceptual art of the 1960s, the “calligraphy” Asher used in her paintings “to register the quicksilver of the life” formed under the same hand that penned her poems. Her formulation of her goal, to register the quicksilver of the life, a strikingly wordy and repetitive objective for a ceaselessly editing poet, repeats definite articles, holding them declarative in its elliptical framing. “The quicksilver” of “the life” is universal and visceral; it is the stuff of

The Thing That Eats the Heart, detail, 1960

Abstract Expressionism and the stuff of poetry, it glitters in the eye and escapes under the hand. Refusing the critical quarrels and stylistic fragmentations of abstract painting that have since become a commonplace in histories of the time, Asher told her younger “fellow artists” of the Feminist Art Program that she was after immortality —an antidote to being “wholly silenced into white nothingness.” 2 She sought the perpetuation of her “self, [her] life line, by pushing myriad reflections of [her] own visions as child, as girl, as adult, as woman, as person, as artist—up to the limits of [her] own creative powers.” 3 A poet and a painter, Asher painted poems, refusing separations of gender or creative discipline that would have limited the horizons for her expansive art. Like the quicksilver of life she aimed to register, Asher sought to escape any attempt to hold her creative work within fixed parameters.

Elise Asher, born in Chicago in 1914, was largely raised by her journalist father, Louis Eller Asher, after her mother died young. Asher’s father seems to have been involved in Chicago’s literary scene. According to Asher, her father hosted Edna St. Vincent Millay in their home at the height of her fame. 4 While there isn’t evidence the two knew each other, Asher shared this rich poetic milieu with her fellow Chicagoan Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), whose mother Marion Strobel was a poet, editor, and advisor for Poetry magazine in the 1920s.

After leaving her first marriage, Asher moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1947 with her young daughter Babette, and began painting. Remarrying with fellow painter Nanno de Groot in 1948, Asher turned to painting and discovered Provincetown’s community of artists, including the legendary teacher and painter Hans Hofmann. Asher married for the third and final

In a review of her first solo exhibition in New York at Tanager Gallery in 1953, the critic Carlyle Burrows wrote in the Herald Tribune, “Designs especially in white and neutral colors show how sensitive she is with virtually non-existent substance. But there is a vacancy in her work which one will find perhaps difficult to reconcile with the responsibility of the artist.” 5 Hailing her sensitivity while, in a backhanded rebuke, criticizing non-existence and vacancy in her work, the problem, chez Burrows, was apparently Asher’s absence. To be absent was to have neglected to put forward some existence, some substance, some presence the moment required. Cloaked in the Existentialist rhetoric ascendent in the early 1950s, Burrows criticized Asher for failing to appear as a distinctive yet decodable existence. Such alleged disappearance puts pressure on Asher’s professed freedom to paint; she was painting under the gaze of a critical establishment looking, perhaps, for someone else, and perhaps implicitly for the kind of legible “signature style” for which the New York School would soon be critiqued.

time in 1957, with the poet Stanley Kunitz, with whom she shared a life between New York and Provincetown. In her professional and personal life, Asher joined poetry and painting, situating herself and her work on a resolutely independent path between word and image.

In New York’s downtown art scene, Asher fell between the “first” generation of the New York School born around the turn of the 20th century and the “second” generation born in the 1920s. Born one year after Philip Guston, and one year before Robert Motherwell, (both her good friends), Asher came of age in the interwar period, witnessing and joining the massive shifts in American poetry and visual art over the 20th century. Yet, confident and independent, Asher stepped lightly across the generational and stylistic divides of her time, forging a singular path among a community of artists in New York and Provincetown.

Asher exhibited her work at Tanager Gallery and the Stable Gallery in the early and mid-1950s and in 1955 published a collection of her poetry The Meandering Absolute. Her paintings from this era are spare compositions over which thinly painted brushstrokes and creamy, even impasto marks announce plant or bird-like forms that burst almost explosively, as if surging all at once from underbrush. These paintings, like her 1957–58 Everbloom, and Cuttings and Flowers, spread so thinly in passages that they nearly merge with the painting’s surface, even as they mass inward and upward in feather-like strokes that coalesce and fan in plumed bursts of color and extension.

Asher’s exhibition of these works at Grand Central Moderns in 1958 garnered numerous reviews, including that of Asher’s fellow poet, critic James Schuyler. Writing in the pages of ArtNews, Schuyler observed, “She likes to contrast pale cartographic shapes with diving strokes, like birds or plumed petals. [. . .] Evergreen lets the wind breathe through it. Sprawling and tangled, it is a low-key intensity of surface that gives her pictures their equilibrium.” 6 Natural metaphors like Schuyler’s, and Burrows’s

Elise Asher (right) at the Tanager Gallery, circa 1952. Tanager Gallery records, 1952–1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

earlier insistence on a legible presence commingle in critic Martica Sawin’s 1958 review in Arts. Sawin wrote,

The bright colors of Elise Asher’s abstractions are swirled about the canvas in small eddies and currents which sometimes disperse themselves without ever having concentrated their forces, but in some paintings they are gathered together into a central movement or activity which makes the canvas more readily readable.7

The critical emphasis on natural metaphor and legibility would, perhaps, merge with Asher’s own distinctive direction; in 1962 Asher had a revelation that changed the direction of her work.

In an undated artist statement, Asher explained the break in her work that led to the calligraphic poem-paintings of the 1960s:

I remember vividly that moment back in ’62. I awoke abruptly to a loud ringing in my ear and a simultaneous vision of a poem actually writing itself across my mind. It was a poem of my husband’s called “Open the Gates,” throbbing with intense violets and amber tones. I lay awake for hours, thoroughly enchanted, playing with that striking fantasy, juggling it around til daybreak. 8

Asher’s recollection of her synesthetic experience of converging language, color, and image softened the

right : Poetry Northwest, Autumn/ Winter 1964–65.

boundaries of each, allowing them to bridge, overlap, merge, and align. Yet, the vision did not just provide a revelatory positive artistic direction, it remedied what Asher described as “a sense of loss with each new painting, a growing awareness of something unused—dreading to complete a canvas so long as it might prove just one more ho-hum-variation on my characteristic wrist-flow.” Poetry was, as she put it, a “parallel element, contrapuntal to those mere nervous lyrical strokes, something involving more of [her] entire sentient being, a prod beyond the sole gift of rhythmic paint.” 9 In Asher’s works, painting and poetry coexist in a symbiotic fusion that holds onto the expressive power of both gestural abstraction and poetry.

In her poem-paintings of the early 1960s, Asher refused to make the poem mere “object-image for [her] painting;” instead her own poems, scribed in her own writing “supplie[d] a vital personal ingredient for a total visual structure.” 10 Neither poem nor painting was to be subjugated in their fusion; the painting-poem was a symbiosis, a hybrid of poem and painting.

Beloved poems by other people that Asher transformed into paintings offered her “multiple communications: hue, shape, sound, thought, mood . . .” that lent themselves to hybrid painted-poetic forms.11 Asher’s distinction between painting her own poems and those of other people is visible in the different handling of poem-paintings like

left : Cover for the exhibition catalogue for Greetings!, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966

Cover design by Elise Asher

The Summing Up (1961) and The Thing That Eats The Heart (1960) that contain poems by Stanley Kunitz, in contrast with Asher’s paintings that illustrate her own work. While Asher’s poem-paintings reliably treat letterforms as painterly strokes, sometimes shifting color, stroke, and even (it seems) painting instrument partway through creating a given word or even letter, in paintings of Kunitz’s poems, the poems are entirely legible. In her untitled painting of 1964 that contains her own poem Conception, much of the poem disappears into the dense, dark blue-purple-red-pink ground of the painting, the legibility of word and letter subsumed by painterly form, with only words like “name,” “innocence,” and “is” floating upward out of the darkness like emanations from an ether.

Whether directly legible as poems (as in The Thing That Eats The Heart ), in which lines and stanzas translate clearly from the page into the artist’s hand, or as an evocative imprint of a poem pervaded by painting (as in Asher’s Untitled painting), Asher’s poem-paintings, (see especially We [1964]), often have a cascading quality. Her writing pulls across the canvas and down, in the familiar pattern of reading, but with the added raining rhythm of vertical strokes that form a visual warp to the weft of the writing. The painting’s vertical address to a standing viewer runs parallel to the horizontal movement of the

reader’s eye, creating a matrix, a tapestry that holds the downward and lateral together in suspension, often pulling away from the painting’s edges to hold reader, image, and text together toward a painting’s center.

Asher’s turn to poem-paintings resonated with the critic Brian O’Doherty, who reviewed her works in a 1963 exhibition at the East Hampton Gallery and praised her use of words “stitched [. . .] through abstract color and calligraphy so that the poem lies half-exploded in an energized lyric bouquet.” 12 O’Doherty saw in Asher’s paintings the evocative movement of image into word and word into image that Asher held in tension like, as he wrote, “a sort of abstract-expressionist New England needlepoint.” The painter, in O’Doherty’s appreciation, was “at her best when [a viewer] has to struggle to decipher the writing, when she makes one work for the words.” He appreciated the “marriage” of poetry and painting when their union was at its most mercurial. In his favorable view of Asher’s distinctive conjugation of painting and poem, he glimpsed the artist herself, slipping ceaselessly in the lyrical space she created between letter and form.

Asher’s treatment of the 23rd Psalm in her monumental painting of 1964–66 bears greater resemblance to her treatment of her own poetry than that of others, and its cascading composition also circulates in literal painted

left : Installation view of Elise Asher, Paintings: Twoand three-dimensional, The Contemporaries, New York, 1966. Photograph by Thomas Feist. The Elise Asher papers, 1923–1994. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

right : Exhibition announcement for Elise Asher, Paintings: Two-and three-dimensional, The Contemporaries, New York, 1966. The Elise Asher Papers, 1923–1994.

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Handwritten draft of “The Inarticulate” by Elise Asher. The Elise Asher papers, 1923–1994. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

eddies—concentric rings of red and blue that hover between drawing and calligraphy. A warm, exuberant palette of carmine and tangerine orange is animated by letterforms in bright blue that practically flip off the canvas, magenta passages, and sunflower-yellow words that seem to ring through the all-over composition. Setting the poetic lines loose in the painting, Asher pulls a singing quality from the familiar Biblical passage, reaching its past as a song. The painting voices the familiar language, filling its lungs with color and exuberance, restoring its air and its declaration, its fearlessness, and public address. “Surely,” a turning point in the poem where the writer turns toward a desired future: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the lord forever,” repeats in the painting in cool shades of blue and aqua, carrying its odd mix of hopefulness and certainty—a prayer, incantation, wish, statement. The painting carries language into the nexus of seeing, hearing, singing, and even crying; lifted from the monochrome page, the emotion of the poem is realized in the efflorescent painting.

In the heyday of Minimalism, Asher wrote in her 1975 statement to other women artists, “I’m not a ‘cool’ artist. My aim is opulence rather than leanness. I want to leave traces of tapestry, of forms and language, not a mere sandal print, behind me.” In her work to pin down “the quicksilver of the life,” she was after fusion and suffusion of image and color, or in other words, tapestry: many threads, hand labor, complexity. Asher’s paintings chew on words, rain them, pull and weave them, transform them into cascading environments of meaning, feeling, and vision. Words thread through color and drag through space; they swirl like wine in a glass, yielding all the ways language and image could taste and feel and appear. A poet and a painter, Asher painted poems, pushing them through art’s staid boundaries, through poetry’s lines and letters, through limits imposed on women artists, forcing the systems of painting and poetry to breathe together. In her opulence, tapestry, and quicksilver independence, Asher worked expansively, overflowing containers as a woman, poet, and artist.

Notes

1. The Feminist Art Program to which Asher sent her statement was at the California Institute of the Arts. I am grateful to archivist Blake Jacobsen for finding Asher’s statement in Art: A Woman’s Sensibility, The collected works and writings of women artists. Asher quoted in a 1975 artist statement, Elise Asher papers, 1923–1994. Folder 47 (Artist Statements). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4 See Christopher Busa, “Elise Asher: Profile of the Artist,” Provincetown Arts, 1992, via Provincetown History Project, 16.

5. Carlyle Burrows [most likely], New York Herald Tribune, 1953. Elise Asher papers, 1923–1994. Folder 53. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

6. James Schuyler, “Reviews and Previews: Elise Asher,” ArtNews 57, no. 8 (December 1958): 59.

7. Martica Sawin, Arts (The Arts Digest), Vol. 33, Issue 3, December 1958, 59-60.

8. Elise Asher, Artist Statement, undated, Elise Asher papers, 1923–1994. Folder 47 (Artist Statements). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Brian O’Doherty, “Art: Poetry in Crystal,” New York Times, April 26, 1963, 32.

ARRIVEDERCI

CYCLE

This day is inconsequential, my love, it seems inconsequence exists for us; rare days in whose ample laps of light we sit on wood and stare while hollow chimes parade along our nerves. You leafing the pages of an austere book and I caught in the nooks of insect intricacy. And at the rear of the long march, the chimes reaffirm our wedding; we interlock our fingers for the ritualistic walking in to dine.

And meanwhile love fretting in the eaves with folded wings: myself and you entwined, lodged up there in one combined complaint high above our hearts this timid hive. Yet we compel such far-off tinkling to sound felicitous as ancient temple bells over the vast inconsequence of living, our intimate forgiving.

Elise Asher, The Meandering Absolute, Morris Gallery Press, 1955, p. 4.

EVERBLOOM, AND CUTTINGS AND FLOWERS 1957–58

OIL ON CANVAS

50 X 60 INCHES

EVERGREEN 1957–58

OIL ON CANVAS

60 X 50 INCHES

UNTITLED

PROCESSIONAL 1959

MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER 40 X 26 INCHES

THE SUMMING UP

When young I scribbled, boasting, on my wall. No Love, No Property, No Wages. In youth’s good time I somehow bought them all, And cheap, you’d think, for maybe a hundred pages.

Now in my prime, disburdened of my gear, My trophies ransomed, broken, lost, I carve again on the lintel of the year My sign: Mobility—and damn the cost!

Stanley Kunitz, Selected Poems 1928-1958, First, Little, Brown and Company, 1958, p. 112.

UNTITLED 1964

OIL ON GESSO BOARD

50 X 24 INCHES

NAMES 1961–63

OIL ON CANVAS

50 X 24 INCHES

MOTET 1959–60

OIL ON MUSLIN MOUNTED ON CANVAS

X 36 INCHES

DOWNWARD RESURRECTION

Still pinioned under rock I felt my Will hoisted, loamy roots being dredged through punctured bone, the entire wreck of me dragged into air and hurled— soaring over plateglass, city clock, past season— above all worldly sound, and there in the high hung haze were you— all brine and bleeding gaze and gifted— all shy, sly, and deliberately loving— knowing well we’d join though both still smarting; till down the slippery light we sped together, like two blue cranes until we hit the belfry where once again our ways would walk the weathers, your salty self recovered, your old powers: those fertile windstrewn words, your raging flowers.

Elise Asher, Poetry Northwest, vol. 5, no. 3 & 4, Autumn/Winter, 1964–65, p. 41.

SLOW PASSAGE AND RODIN 1959

DOWNWARD RESURRECTION 1963–64

OIL ON

24 X 20 INCHES

EMBER AND SICK BED 1965

72 X 54 INCHES

MASONITE

OIL ON CANVAS

THE THING THAT EATS THE HEART

The thing that eats the heart comes wild with years. It died last night, or was it wounds before, But somehow crawls around, inflamed with need, Jingling its medals at the fang-scratched door.

We were not unprepared: with lamp and book We sought the wisdom of another age Until we heard the action of the bolt. A little wind investigates the page.

No use pretending to the pitch of sleep; By turnings we are known, our times and dates

Examined in the courts of either/or While armless griefs mount lewd and headless doubts.

It pounces in the dark, all pity-ripe, An enemy as soft as tears or cancer, In whose embrace we fall, as to a sickness Whose toxins in our cells cry sin and danger.

Hero of crossroads, how shall we defend This creature-lump whose charity is art When its own self turns Christian-cannibal?

The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart.

Stanley Kunitz, Selected Poems 1928-1958, First, Little, Brown and Company, 1958, p. 71.

THE VINTAGE YEARS

UNTITLED 1960

MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER

23 X 30 INCHES

UNTITLED 1960

MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER

22 X 30 INCHES

THE APPLE 1962

MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER

11 X 13 INCHES

UNTITLED 1964 MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER 15 X 10 INCHES

23RD PSALM 1964–66 OIL ON CANVAS 100 X 72 INCHES

THE LAST ABSURDITY

Each one dies, curled, alone, a baby god busily swelling his own uniqueness there is no pity in this Nether world, solitary souls simply enduring no sorrow here, no joy: no capacity. (a purling wombworld day and night) no hinging love upon circling hinges–gloom-blooms all, beholden to no one–not even to the beautiful craziness of whit.

Elise Asher, The Meandering Absolute , Morris Gallery Press, 1955, p. 41.

Elise Asher

b. 1912, Chicago, IL

d. 2004, New York, NY

EDUCATION

Art Institute of Chicago 1934 Simmons School of Social Work

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2023

2017

Elise Asher: The Vintage Years, Paintings from 1958–70 , Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY

Elise Asher: Poetic Landscapes , June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

2004 Elise Asher: A Memorial Exhibition , June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

2000

Elise Asher: Paintings and Drawings , curated by Varujan Boghosian, Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA

1997 The Visionary Field : Paintings by Elise Asher, The Gallery at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Princeton, NJ

1994 A Place Apart , June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

1992 Paintings , curated by Margaret Sheffield and Rosa Slivka, The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA

1991 Lightfall , June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

1988 Drawings by Elise Asher: Passages, Including “The Long Boat Series,” William Benton Museum, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

1987 The Long Boat Series , Ingber Gallery, New York, NY

1986 Elise Asher: Paintings and Drawings , Cherry Stone Gallery, Wellfleet, MA

1985 The Edge of Time , Ingber Gallery, New York, NY

1983 Outscapes , Ingber Gallery, New York, NY

1981

Elise Asher, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC

Elise Asher: Paintings and Drawings , Cherry Stone Gallery, Wellfleet, MA

Elsewhere , Ingber Gallery, New York, NY

1979 part of another country, Ingber Gallery, New York, NY

1976 Elise Asher: Paintings on Plexiglass , Washington Women’s Art Center, Washington, DC

Elise Asher, Marsh Gallery, University of Richmond, VA

1973 Elise Asher: Illuminations , Peter M. David Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, NY

1971 Elise Asher and Robert Beauchamp , Tirca Karlis Gallery, Provincetown, MA

The Testing Tree , The Gotham Book Mart Gallery, New York, NY

1966 Paintings: two-and-three-dimensional, The Contemporaries, New York, NY

1964 Elise Asher Retrospective, Bradford Junior College Gallery, Bradford, MA

1963 Paintings and Drawings , Mary Harriman Gallery, Boston, MA

Elise Asher, East Hampton Gallery, NY

1958 Elise Asher, Grand Central Moderns, New York, NY

1953 Elise Asher: Paintings, Tanger Gallery, New York, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2023 Beauty of Summer, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

1996 The Boat, Object and Metaphor, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NY and the Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

1995 Animals, Animals, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY

1994 A Long Flowering , Madelyn Jordon Fine Art, Scarsdale, NY

1990 Barbara Fendrick Gallery, New York, NY

Andre Zarre Gallery, New York, NY

The Expanding Figurative Imagination , Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY

Peter M. David Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

1989 Invitational Show, Long Point Gallery, Provincetown, MA

Candidates for Art Awards , American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

1987 Going Fishing , Graham Modern, New York, NY

1986 Cross Currents , Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY

1985 Survival of the Fittest: Works on Paper, Ingber Gallery, New York, NY

Tribute to Stanley Kunitz , Long Point Art Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1984 Summer 1984 , Cherry Stone Gallery, Wellfleet, MA

1983 Written Imagery Unleashed in the 20th Century, Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, Hempstead, NY

1980 Award Selected Candidates , American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

Word and Image: A Tradition in Books , University of New Hampshire

Art Galleries, Durham, NH

1979 Reverse Painting , Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI

Invitational Show, Provincetown Art Association, MA

118 Artists , Landmark Gallery, New York, NY

1978 Tweed Museum, Duluth, MN

Book Forms , Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH

Independent Curators, Inc., traveling exhibition

Women Painters and Poets, New York University, New York, NY

Women Artists ’78: Visual Artists Coalition, Inc. Exhibition , Lincoln Center, New York, NY

1977 Cape Cod as Art Colony, Heritage Museum, Sandwich, MA

1976 The Books as Art , Fendrick Gallery, Washington, DC

The Object as Poet , traveling exhibit, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, and Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, NY

40 Years of American Collage, Buecker & Harpsichord, New York, NY

10 Artists , Landmark Gallery, New York, NY

1975 118 Artists , Landmark Gallery, New York, NY

Color, Light, & Image , Women’s Interart Center, New York, NY

1973 Women Chose Women , New York Cultural Center, New York, NY

The Emerging Real , Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY

1972 Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY

1971 The Line as Form , Parker Street 470, Boston, MA

A New Consciousness , Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY

Homage to Tanager, Roko Gallery, New York, NY

1970 The Words as Image , Jewish Museum, New York, NY

ART NOW: NEW YORK , New York, NY

Birds and Beasts, Graham Gallery, New York, NY

1969 Posters by Artists , traveling exhibition, Finch College Museum of Art, New York, NY

1968 Second 1968 Exhibition , Provincetown Art Association, MA

1967 Week of the Angry Arts: Against the War in Vietnam , New York, NY

Art for Peace , sponsored by the Artists & Writers Protest: Angry Arts for Life and Against the War in Vietnam, New York, NY

Second 1967 Show, Provincetown Art Association, MA

Words , Richard Feigen Gallery, New York, NY

Selection 1967: Recent Acquistions in Modern Art , UC Berkeley University Art Museum, CA

Artists for SEDF: Annual Exhibition and Sale , Waddell Gallery, New York, NY

1966 Biennial, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC

Greetings , Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1965 Second 1965 Show, Provincetown Art Association, MA

1964 Arts and Letters, Howard Wise Gallery, New York, NY

Drawings , Westerly Gallery, New York, NY

1963 Lettering by Modern Artists , Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Third 1963 Show, Provincetown Art Association, New York, NY

Sixteen Massachusetts Women Painters, Fitchburg Art Museum, MA

1962 Elise Asher, Joan Mathews , The New Gallery, Provincetown, MA

The Closing Show, Tanager Gallery, New York, NY

1961 Artists Memorial Exhibition for Ilya Schor, Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY

Drawings , College Art Symposium, Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, IA

1960 American Painting, Esther Stuttman Gallery, New York, NY

Contemporary Drawings American & European, Bertha Schaefer Gallery New York, NY

1959 Art USA , The Coliseum, New York, NY

American Academy of Arts and Letters, Childe Hassam

Purchasing Find Show, New York, NY

1956 Second 1956 Exhibition , Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA

1955 Paintings Sculpture , Tanager Gallery, New York, NY

1953 Annuals, Stable Gallery Artists, New York, NY

Tanager Gallery, New York, NY

Artists Gallery, New York, NY

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, CA

Ciba-Geigy Corporation, Ardsley, NY

Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY

Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC

Crocker National Bank, San Francisco, CA

Finch College Art Museum, New York, NY

First National Bank of Chicago, IL

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI

National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC

The New York University Art Collection, Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY

Poets House, New York, NY

Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Sheraton Plaza Corporation, Washington, DC

Tougaloo College, Jackson, MI

Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC

The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

ARTIST’S POETRY

E. Asher, The Meandering Absolute , (New York: Morris Gallery Press) 1955.

E. Asher, Night Train: Poems by Elise Asher, (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press) 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Cotter, “Elise Asher,” Art in Review, New York Times , Sep. 17, 2004.

S. Harrison, “Asher’s art is visual poetry & metaphor,” Provincetown Banner and The Advocate , Aug. 24, 2000.

V. Katz, Art in America , Nov. 1994.

T.R. Lundquist, ed., Exh. Cat., Elise Asher: Paintings , The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 1992.

D. Sutton, “When Art becomes Poetry and Poetry Art,” Reporter, Spring 1991.

Drawings by Elise Asher, Exh. Cat., William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT, 1988.

C. Little, “Elise Asher at Ingber,” Art in America , Jun. 1987.

B. Ruhe, Art/World , May 1987.

C. Busa, ed., Provincetown Arts , Aug. and Fall, 1986.

L. Rush, “Asher Finds Inspiration in Poetry,” Provincetown Advocate , Aug. 1986.

D. Callanan, “A Poem Transformed,” The Register, 1986.

Cross Currents , Exh. Cat., Guild Hall and PAAM Collections exchange exhibition, 1986.

R. Slivka, Arts Magazine , Jun. 1985.

Livres D’Artistes , Exh. Cat., BPI Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, FR, 1984.

R. Cohen, ARTnews , Sep. 1983.

American Drawings, Watercolors and Pastels, etc., Exh. Cat., Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, 1983.

Written Imagery Unleashed in the Twentieth Century, Exh. Cat., Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, NY, 1983.

M. Abell, “Personal Mythology,” Artspeak , Apr. 14, 1983.

P. Paine, Art/World , Apr. 1983.

C.S. Rubenstein, American Women Artists , Avon Press, 1982.

C. Gammon, “Asher’s Personal Bestiary,” The Advocate, Aug. 1981.

V. Raynor, “Elise Asher,” New York Times , Apr. 1981.

M.R. Meyer, “Elise Asher,” Art/World , Mar.–Apr. 1981.

W. Pellicone, “Asher’s Real ‘Otherness,” Artspeak , Mar. 1981.

P. Carlson, “Asher at the Ingber,” Art in America , Oct. 1979.

K. Basquin, “Glass Backwards,” The New Art Examiner, Nov. 1979.

E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, Simon and Schuster, 1979. Artists’ Books USA , Exh. Cat., Independent Curators, Inc., Washington, DC, 1978.

B.H. Friedman, “Too Little Attention,” New Boston Review, Summer 1977.

The Book as Art No. 2 , Exh. Cat., Fendrick Gallery, Washington, DC, 1977.

B. Schwartz, Washington Artists News , Mar. 1976.

M. Kernan, “Images in Words,” Washington Post , Jan. 22, 1976.

L. Campbell, ARTnews , Feb. 1974.

H.Z., Pictures on Exhibit, 1958, 1974.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to the family of Elise Asher for trusting us to steward the legacy of this visionary artist in a reappraisal of her work, decades overdue. Together with many of Asher’s friends, they provided invaluable insights about the artist. We would like to especially acknowledge Babette Becker, Lisa Drabkin, Madeleine Ezanno, and Sherry Sidoti. We thank Amy Rahn for her thoughtful and important essay on Asher in this catalogue and appreciate her careful engagement with the work and commitment to feminist methodology in approaching this topic. During the exhibition, we hosted a poetry-centered event with four writers, accomplished in their own right, each with a personal connection to the artist. We thank Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Victoria Redel, and Sherry Sidoti for sharing their own brilliant writing, inspired readings of Asher’s poetry, and an engaging conversation about the artist and her work. We would like to thank the Archives of American Art and the Archives staff for all of their help with our research. I would like to personally thank the entire gallery staff for all of their work on the exhibition and this catalogue. None of this would be possible without them!

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ELISE ASHER: THE VINTAGE YEARS, PAINTINGS OF THE 1950 s AND 60 s

October 27–December 22, 2023

on view at Eric Firestone Gallery 40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY

ISBN: 979-8-9885944-3-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024901317

Cover: Arrivederci, detail, 1959–60, see page 12

Reproduction of contents prohibited

Published by Eric Firestone Press

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

Eric Firestone Gallery

40 Great Jones Street New York, NY 10012

646-998-3727

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

631-604-2386

ericfirestonegallery.com

Principal: Eric Firestone

Managing Partner: Kara Winters

Director: Jennifer Samet

Associate Director: Maddy Henkin

Principal Photography: Sam Glass

Design: Russell Hassell, New York

Printing: Puritan, New Hampshire

Eric Firestone

Elise Asher: The Vintage Years, Paintings from 1958–70