Lilly Fenichel

Lilly Fenichel (b. ca. 1927), is an American painter who has explored abstraction through a wide range of media and approaches, with her various periods linked together by a common emphasis on color harmonies and expressive, often calligraphic gesture. Her earliest work is associated with second-generation Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.

Lilly Fenichel was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family. Her father was a doctor and her mother a fashion designer; the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel was her uncle. In 1939, following the Nazi invasion of Austria, her family fled the country, going first to the United Kingdom and then to the United States, where they settled in Hollywood.

Fenichel studied art at the Chouinard Art Institute (1946–47) and Los Angeles City College (1947–48). She then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to study at the California School of Fine Arts (1950–52), where she worked with the painters Edward Corbett, Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park. She started showing her work in the early 1950s. Her vigorously gestural, often black-and-white paintings from the 1960s and 1970s are grouped with work by other West Coast second-generation Abstract Expressionists such as Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, and Sonia Gechtoff. Stylistically, her work from this period shows the influence of both West Coast Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. Of her own work from this period, Fenichel has said it was Abstract Expressionism "with a lot of drawing in it."

Unable to support herself with her painting, she worked as a photographers' stylist and as an art director and costume designer for movies. She served as the art director for the 1975 film Lucky Lady starring Liza Minnelli.

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