Ethel Schwabacher | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Ethel Schwabacher (1903-1984)

Born to a wealthy family in New York in 1903, Ethel Schwabacher (née Kremer) traveled in avant-garde circles beginning in the 1920s, both as a painter and a patron. Her first art training, at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design, was in sculpture. She shifted her focus to painting in 1927, when she began studying with Max Weber at the Art Students League. Around that time, Schwabacher met Arshile Gorky. As a result of their close and enduring friendship, she became one of the artist’s first biographers (her monograph was published in 1957).

Gorky was an important mentor for Schwabacher: he introduced her to automatic techniques and spurred her interest in exploring her unconscious through art and self-analysis. Although Schwabacher had friendships with Abstract Expressionists, she rejected the misogyny she perceived in the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. She explored themes of womanhood and motherhood in a luminous abstract style. Later in her career she explored her personal memories and vision through the lens of Greek mythology.

In addition to participating in group exhibitions, Schwabacher had a number of solo shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. She died in 1984.