Janice Biala

Janice Biala (September 11, 1903 – September 24, 2000) was a Polish-born American artist whose work, spanning seven decades, is well regarded both in France and the United States. Her work lies between figuration and abstraction. A modernist, she transformed her subjects into shape and color using "unexpected color relationships and a relaxed approach to interpreting realism." The family also Americanized its forenames. Biala, whose Hebrew name was Schenehaia, became Janice and Yakov became Jack. Jack would later change his surname to a simplified form of the original family name and, using that name, Jack Tworkov, would establish himself as a highly regarded painter of the New York School. Following her brother's lead, Janice Bernstein became Janice Tworkov and, in 1929, was naturalized as a U.S. citizen with that name. Despite differences of medium and treatment, Biala's self-portrait of 1925 shows similarities of style. From Dickinson, Biala learned to focus on the essential elements of a subject, to see these elements as abstract forms on the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, and to select the color values that would become the key to the finished work. Dickinson recognized that color relationships are more important to the artist than single colors in isolation. As he did, she painted figuratively but she believed color harmonies to be more important than accurate representation of a subject. Their compositions tended toward bold, simplified shapes and were more reductively abstract and spatially flat than those of many of their contemporaries. In 1947 she and Brustlein returned to live in France where she exhibited regularly at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher. While not herself an abstract expressionist, Biala fostered the movement, particularly through the support she gave Willem de Kooning. In the early 1940s, she convinced her New York dealer to show some of de Kooning's paintings, Biala cared for him when he was ill, and Biala joined him in discussions at the abstract expressionist discussion group called Studio 35. Like Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, and others, Biala was not treated as an equal by the male artists of the New York School or by critics such as Harold Rosenberg. Despite her friendship with abstract expressionist artists, Biala retained a unique approach to her art in which no art movement showed dominance. As one critic put it, "she continued to paint exquisitely crafted canvases in a personal style that, even now, resists classification." In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Family life

In 1903 Biala was born in Biała Podlaska, a small city in eastern Poland located near the border with Russia. At that time, Biała Podlaska was within the Russian Empire. Long a trading center, the town's population then numbered about 13,000 people, half of whom—including Biala's family—were Jewish.

During her life, Biala went by quite a few names. Her birth name in Hebrew was Schenehaia Tworkovska. After immigration, this became Janice Bernstein. As a young adult, she became Janice Tworkov (as mentioned). During the 1920s she painted under this name or J. Tworkov. In the early 1920s she married a friend of Jack's, the painter, Lee Gatch. For both of them, Paris was "home." In the 1980s Biala told an interviewer that she fell in love with France when she first travelled there in 1930: "In some ways, it reminded me of the place I was born in. And when I came to France I felt as if I had come home. I smelled the same smells of bread baking and dogs going around in a very busy way, you know, as if they knew what they were about. It really was extraordinarily human." Brooklyn Museum Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City, MO Musée de Grenoble, France Centre Pompidou, Paris, France Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Books by Biala

Biala furnished cover art and illustrations for some of Ford's books and, in the 1950s she wrote children's books. This list comes from the WorldCat online catalog, the Library of Congress catalog, and other sources. It is in chronological order.

Great trade route by Ford Madox Ford, with illustrations by Biala (New York, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1937) Provence: from Minstrels to the Machine by Ford Madox Ford, with illustrations by Janice Brustlein Biala (London, G. Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1938) It's Spring, It's Spring by Janice Biala, with illustrations by Daniel Brustlein (New York, Whittlesey House, 1956) Lonely Little Lady and Her Garden by Janice, illustrated by Mariana [pseud. for Marian (Mariana) F. Curtiss] (New York, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1967) Little Bear's Sunday Breakfast by Janice, illustrated by Mariana (New York, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1958) Minette by Janice Biala, with illustrations by Daniel Brustlein (New York, Whittlesey House, 1959) Angelique by Janice Brustlein, with illustrations by Roger Duvoisin (Whittlesey House/McGraw-Hill, 1960) Little Bear's Pancake Party by Janice, with pictures by Mariana (New York, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1960) A Duck Called Angelique by Janice Brustlein, illustrated by Roger Duvoisin (The Bodley Head Ltd, 1962) Little bear's Sunday Breakfast by Janice Brustlein, illustrated by Mariana (Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Hale, 1963) Little Bear's Christmas by Janice Brustlein, with pictures by Mariana (New York, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co. 1964) Little Bear's Thanksgiving by Janice, illustrated by Mariana (New York, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1967) Little Bear Marches in the St. Patrick's Day Parade by Janice Brustlein, with illustrations by Mariana (New York, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1967) Little Bear's Pancake Party by Janice Biala (Glenview, Ill. Scott, Foresman, 1967) Little Bear Learns to Read the Cookbook by Janice, with illustrations by Mariana (New York, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1969) Little Bear's New Year's party by Janice, illustrated by Mariana (New York, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1973) Mr. and Mrs. Button's Wonderful Watchdogs by Janice Brustlein, illustrated by Roger Duvoisin (William Morrow & Co, 1978)