Perle Fine

Perle Fine (born Poule Feine; 19051988) was an American abstract expressionist painter. Fine's work was most known by its combination of fluid and brushy rendering of the materials and the use of biomorphic forms encased and intertwined with irregular geometric shapes. "Starting almost immediately in grammar school at the time of the First World War... I did posters and started winning little prizes and getting encouragement that way. So that by the time I graduated from high school I knew very well I wanted to be an artist." In the late 1930s she began to study with Hans Hofmann in New York City as well as in Provincetown.

Fine ran the East River Gallery on East 57th Street from 1936 to 1938, and opened her own gallery in 1940. In 1945, she had her first solo exhibit at the Willard Gallery on East 57th Street. The show was located at 60 East 9th Street on the first floor and in the basement of a building which was about to be demolished. According to Bruce Altshuler:

The artists celebrated not only the appearance of the dealers, collectors and museum people on the 9th Street, and the consequent exposure of their work, but they celebrated the creation and the strength of a living community of significant dimensions.

Starting with the Ninth Street Show, Fine participated in each of the invitational New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals from 1951 to 1957. She was one of just 24 out of a total 256 New York School artists who was included in all the Annuals. These Annuals were important because the participants were chosen by the artists themselves. Other women artists who took part in all the shows were Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell.

In 1965, she developed a severe case of mononucleosis. Around this time, she took up making wood collages, employing curvilinear forms.

The Cool series: 1961–1963 Her Cool series of 1961–1963 represented a break away from the Abstract Expressionist works of her earlier years. She stated that the paintings were a “growth” rather than a “departure”, developing from “a need within the painting to express more.”

Position as a female artist Fine, along with other female artists such as Fannie Hillsmith and Lee Krasner, experienced significant constraints to their opportunities and exposure on the basis of their gender. "he very image of the Abstract Expressionist painter was a white, heterosexual male... this movement, which perceived itself as a glyph of individual freedom, constricted the entry of women, African Americans, and homosexuals, regardless of the nature and quality of their work." Women of Abstract Expressionism from the 9th Street Show at the Katonah Museum of Art; and Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection.

In 2016 her work was included in the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum. 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.

Fine's work is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Visual analysis During the 1940s, Cézanne's work had a significant effect on Fine's development as an artist. She took into consideration the way he developed an order from nature and took control of the canvas; this enabled her to form images in their own space on the canvas.

Because Fine was able to self-isolate in the Springs of East Hamptons, she was able to take inspiration from her natural surroundings. Although Fine was adamant that her works were solely based on the way her materials interacted, people felt that it was hard to not see the connections she made with her surrounding in Springs. Fine once stated, “For me reality exists in the aura of the unknown. The spell-binding quality, the one that beckons and holds, the unpremeditated, the nameless, touched off perhaps by some transcendental experience but guided by a poetic and creative mind – these are the things hidden beneath the surface”.