ABOUT PERLE FINE
Childhood
One of six children, Perle Fine was born near Boston in 1905, shortly after her parents emigrated from Russia. Her father was a dairy farmer, and while not in school, she helped out doing chores around the farm and house. She remembered, "We had a marvellous childhood. We always had lots to eat, lots of fresh good milk, cream, cheese, butter, everything. I never knew how poor we were." Fine's interest in art started at an early age, making posters and winning small prizes through her time in grammar school. When she graduated from high school, she was set on having a career as an artist. None of her other siblings were artists, but her sister was a pianist and encouraged her creativity.
Education and Early Training
She began her artistic studies at the Boston Practical School of Art, where she learned illustration and graphic design. During her time there, she lamented the lack of a vibrant artistic community, and in 1928, when she was in her twenties, she decided to move to New York City. She continued her illustration and design studies when she enrolled in the Grand Central School of Art, where her work won first prize for illustration in 1930. It was during this time when she met fellow student Maurice Berezov, who became a photographer and who she married in 1930. In an effort to hone her skills, Fine spent hours visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, copying works by artist she admired like Renoir, Cézanne and Gauguin. Feeling a need to move beyond illustration, she transferred to the Arts Students League and studied under Kimon Nicolaides, who himself had studied with John Sloan. Absorbing his academic approach and insistence on spontaneity, Fine commented that during this time the most important thing she learnt was "what three-dimensional painting really was...actually trying to do it in his method, which was using brown wrapping paper and painting with black and white oil on that to the point where the figure almost looked like sculpture coming out of the wall."
SOURCE: TheArtStory.com
In the early 1940s, when Fine was in her mid-30s, she rented a small, cold water flat that doubled as her studio on Manhattan’s 8th Street, the main drag of Abstract Expressionist activity and discussion. Across the street, the Hans Hofmann School buzzed with students eager to set objectivity aside and take up pure abstraction—Fine was one of them. Around the corner, Hofmann, de Kooning, and other AbEx pioneers discussed painting and swilled booze at The Club, their members-only haunt. Fine was one of the first and very few women allowed through its doors.
After moving to East Hampton with her husband, the photographer and art director Maurice Berezov, Fine made some of her most ambitious paintings—compositions that surged with deep passages of black paint and textured areas of collage. She worked on the floor to create these, moving across them using an elevated plank. Despite her innovative exploration of Abstract Expressionism, which she fused with an interest in the pure forms of Neo-Plasticism, Fine was not included in the Whitney’s 1978 show “Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,” which she contested in two letters to the museum. She later became a renowned professor at Hofstra University, but stated: “I never thought of myself as a student or teacher, but as a painter. When I paint something I am very much aware of the future. If I feel something will not stand up 40 years from now, I am not interested.”
SOURCE: Atsy.net