Sylvia Fein

Sylvia Doris (Scheuber) Fein is an American surrealist painter and author, born in November 1919 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Fein met her husband William “Bill” Scheuber at 19 and they married four years later on May 30, 1942. She studied painting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she became part of a group of magical realist painters, including Gertrude Abercrombie, Marshall Glasier, John Wilde, Dudley Huppler, and Karl Priebe. During this time, newspapers described Fein as “Wisconsin’s Foremost Woman Painter.” Inspired by the quattrocento, Fein paints in egg tempera, which she mixes herself by puncturing the yolk and mixing the drainage with an equal amount of water. While her paintings were always informed by Surrealism, Fein turned her back on narrative fantasies to focus on studies of the natural and mystical world. 

In 1943, Fein moved to Mexico after her husband was away on military service so she could recuperate from pneumonia. She planned to visit her mother in Mexico City, but was convinced by a classmate to travel to Ajijic on the shores of Lake Chapala where she lived and painted for three years. Even 60 years later, Fein says that since her time in Mexico in 1943, she has “loved Mexico and could cry on the return because I have the dust of Mexico on my heart.” During her time in Mexico, Fein was part of group exhibitions at the Villa Montecarlo as well as completing paintings for her first solo exhibition at the Perls Galleries in New York City.  Along with painting, Fein helped rebuild the adobe house in which she had her studio, taught English to young people, and started an embroidered blouse industry for women. She also provided paper, pencils, and crayons to children in exchange for exotic insects.

When her husband has returned from war, the couple lived in Mexico City for a little bit and then drove back to the U.S. with Fein’s paintings in the back seat. Fein’s first solo exhibition was a great success and had a featured article praising her work in The New Yorker. In the 1946-47 Whitney Annual exhibition, Fein’s work was shown alongside those of Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, and Jackson Pollock. After World War II had ended, Fein and her husband moved to the San Francisco Bay area where she completed her MFA at the University of California, Berkeley in 1951.

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