Janice Biala

Janice Biala
Janice Biala, 1956
Born	Schenehaia Tworkovska September 11, 1903 Biała Podlaska
Died	September 23, 2000(2000-09-23) (aged 97) Paris, France
Nationality	Naturalized citizen of the United States
Alma mater	National Academy of Design
Known for	American artist
Website	janicebiala.com
Memorial(s)	Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, City University of New York organized an exhibition of her work, entitled Biala: Vision and Memory

Janice Biala (September 11, 1903 – September 24, 2000) was an artist whose work, spanning seven decades, is well regarded both in France and the United States. Known for her "impeccable taste and remarkable intelligence", as well as her "intuitive feeling for composition and her orchestration of color", she made paintings of intimate interiors, still lifes, portraits of her friends, and cityscapes of the places she traveled. Her work, which defies easy classification, lies between figuration and abstraction. One of the great modernists, she transformed her subjects into shape and color using "unexpected color relationships and a relaxed approach to interpreting realism."

In 1903 Biala was born in Biała Podlaska, a small city in the Kingdom of Poland with an important Imperial Russian garrison. She immigrated to New York in 1913, arriving with her mother, Esther, and brother, Yakov (Jacob). Her father, Hyman Tworkovsky, was a tailor who had emigrated New York earlier. Biala's parents changed their surname to Bernstein because a relative whom they listed as sponsor on their immigration documents bore that name. 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.

Biala was educated in New York's public school system. At an early age she decided to become a professional artist and, during her high school years, she and friends got together for informal sketching sessions. When she was twenty she enrolled at the National Academy of Design's art course where Charles Hawthorne was teaching a life drawing class. At this time she also met Hawthorne's associate, Edwin Dickinson, who was teaching a class at the Art Students League. and in the summer of 1923 she convinced her brother Jack to accompany her to the artist colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in order to study with Hawthorne and Dickinson. During 1924 and 1925 she studied at Manhattan's Art Students League where Hawthorne was then teaching. In 1924 Dickinson made a portrait of her which shows a serious young woman, somberly dressed. 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.