Ethel Schwabacher

Ethel Schwabacher, née Ethel Kremer, (born May 20, 1903, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 25, 1984, New York City), American artist associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Though not as well-known as her male peers or as Lee Krasner, Elaine DeKooning, or Helen Frankenthaler, her work is found in major museum collections throughout the United States, and exhibitions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries brought recognition to her talent and extensive body of work.

Kremer was raised in an affluent home in the Pelham suburb of New York City. She began painting and keeping a journal at an early age. Her first experiments in painting captured the flora and foliage in the garden of her family’s home. In 1918, at age 15, she began taking classes in sculpture at the Art Students League in New York City and had a brief apprenticeship with sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington in 1923. In 1927 Kremer turned from sculpture to painting and enrolled in a class with artist Max Weber at the League. That was also the year she met Surrealist artist Arshile Gorky, with whom she later studied and formed an important friendship and artistic relationship.

Kremer spent from 1928 to 1934 in Vienna and in the south of France. She painted and, having made an attempt on her own life in 1927, underwent intensive psychological analysis in Vienna with Helene Deutsch, a colleague of Sigmund Freud’s. When she returned to New York City, she met and soon married lawyer Wolf Schwabacher, who proved to be a nurturing partner, both emotionally and professionally. In 1934 Ethel Schwabacher reconnected with Gorky, with whom she took private lessons and learned the Surrealist technique of automatism. The Surrealist practice of mining the subconscious for material combined with her personal experience in analysis were the overriding influences in her paintings of the late 1930s and the 1940s. Gorky’s suicide in 1948 was a tremendous blow for Schwabacher. In 1951 she contributed to the catalogue for the Gorky retrospective held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and nine years after his death she published the first monograph on him.

Throughout the 1950s she painted compositions related to fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth, inspired by her own experience of giving birth in 1936 and in 1941. She created a series of paintings called Odes, which depicted her immense grief at the untimely death of her husband in 1951. She attempted suicide again in 1952 but, after she emerged from a coma brought on by that atttempt, she began painting again and continued psychological treatment. In 1953 she had a solo exhibition of Odes and other works at the well-known Betty Parsons Gallery, where many of the most successful Abstract Expressionists and colour-field painters had found representation.

Toward the very end of the 1950s, still working with abstraction but now introducing figuration as well, Schwabacher began painting compositions based on Greek mythical subjects such as Orestes, Sisyphus, Antigone, Prometheus, and a series based on Orpheus and Eurydice. Her extensive journal writing shows she identified strongly with those stories, tragedies, and characters. She addressed the American civil rights movement in a series of paintings of 1963–64. When her work was deemed too political by Parsons, Schwabacher found representation at the Greenross Gallery instead. She continued her mythic and also biblical scenes throughout the 1960s and began a small-scale series titled My Parnassus in the early 1970s, portraits of famous people such as Freud and Gorky. In 1974 she published a book on her friend, the artist John Ford. Though severe arthritis forced her to stop painting in the mid-1970s, she dictated into a tape recorder and sometimes wrote a journal of her thoughts on art and the creative process, selections of which were published in Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (1993).