Berry Campbell is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by the renowned Abstract Expressionist painter, Perle Fine (1905-1988) Committed to abstraction throughout a career that lasted fifty years, Perle Fine maintained high ideals, never adopting a method to follow a trend or compromising when her work was outside the mainstream. Although she experienced the barriers that limited the opportunities for women artists in the era—especially those who entered into the macho milieu of Abstract Expressionism—she held to her belief that it was painting itself that mattered, not who had created it. However, Fine’s achievement and that of other women of her time are now being given serious attention, such as in the 2016 exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, held at the Denver Art Museum. Recently Fine was included in Sparkling Amazons: Women of Abstract Expressionism from the 9th Street Show at the Katonah Museum of Art and Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection curated by Richard Prince at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Perle Fine: The Accordment Series will open with a reception on Thursday, February 13, 2020 from 6 to 8 pm and will continue through March 14, 2020.
THE ACCORDMENT SERIES (1969 - 1985)
Born in 1905, Perle Fine was a part of the very early generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, including Lee Krasner (b. 1908), Willem de Kooning (b. 1904), and Mark Rothko (b. 1903). After Fine studied with Hans Hofmann in the 1930s, Willem de Kooning invited Fine to join the group of downtown artists who formed the 8th Street Club (“The Club”), where she became a formidable member. She was one of the first female artists to show with Betty Parsons Gallery and also became one of the few women included in the famed 9th Street Show of 1951.
Fine had a long and successful career, never wavering from her commitment to painting in a pure abstract manner with color as her focus. However, Fine never felt the need to create a “signature” style and found ways to continually look forward to advance her concepts and methods as dictated by her personal creativity.
In the early 1950s, Fine created soft, undulating forms in her Prescience Series. She then followed this series by working in a more classic Abstract Expressionist style in the later 1950s. Preparing for a solo exhibition at Graham Gallery, New York in the early 1960s, Fine surprised her colleagues by showing a new body of work she called the Cool Series. She shifted away from gestural painting towards a more contemporary color field mode by using rectangular, geometric shapes floating atop fields of soft colors. By 1965, she reinvented herself again by making three-dimensional wood collages painted with strong patterns. Shifting tastes had moved on and away from Abstract Expressionism and, on par with the times and still immersed in the downtown art scene, Fine created collages in an Op Art style akin to Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. This genre of art was the focus of the important exhibition, The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1965.
Perle Fine created the Accordment Series from 1969 through the mid-1980s. This group of paintings is a culmination of all of the modes of painting that came before. Fine named the series “accordment” meaning “an agreement” or “acceptance.”1 In the 1940s, the grid structure became an important element for Fine based on Piet Mondrian’s theories, which made a huge impact on her creative decisions. “He freed every artist,” she said.2
Fine’s connection with Minimalism is clear. Kathleen Housley states in her seminal book, Tranquil Power: The Art and Life of Perle Fine: “Close in age and in temperament, Fine and [Agnes] Martin shared many similarities, one being that their art was routinely described by critics as ‘atmospheric’ and ‘classic.’”3 The two artists appeared together in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1962 called Geometric Abstraction in America. Perle Fine’s grids are set apart from minimalist tendencies by using colorful lines, planes of color, and sweeping brushstrokes. Housley states: “Fine’s unique strength was, and always had been, her use of color.”4
Perle Fine started painting the Accordments while she was teaching at Hofstra University (1962–1973). While working on this series, she was honored with a retrospective exhibition at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, in 1978. Perle Fine: Major Works 1954-1978 displayed her early paintings, but also emphasized her current body of work, the Accordments. In the exhibition catalogue, museum curator, David Deitcher, said of these paintings, “bands of color produce luminosity that seems to emanate from within the grid itself.” Of the early Accordments, he writes: “Beginning in 1969 she returned full-time to the two-dimensional support, using an all-over linear pattern on a field of color. Yet in some paintings, a curving all-over pattern meanders across the monochromatic ground and leads the eye through the remains of vertical/horizontal structure. In others, a simple grid criss-crosses the colored field. Some of its interstices contain diagonal lines, adding a flickering affect.”5
In a 1978 review in the New York Times, Vivien Raynor highlights Fine’s paintings in a group show titled, On the Edge of Color, at Landmark Gallery in SoHo: “The most luminous shades are here in Perle Fine’s small striped canvas-one of her ‘Accordment’ series-in which stripes of pink, pinkish blue and light orange enhance one another vertically; while horizontals in faint pencil divide them at a measured intervals.”6 There is a playful feel to the way the grid at top of the colored ground makes the eye dance around the canvas. On closer look, the viewer can see the grid lines are painted in varying vibrating colors that shift the focus from one line to the other.
Peter Frank wrote in the Village Voice of her Accordments: “Her brushwork was very sensual, at times not only underlying the grid, but surrounding it and ‘reinventing’ it from reaching the picture’s edge.”7 Housley continues: “The handrendered lines, fluctuating in intensity, and the alternation of color longitudinally set up ‘color-rhythms’ that were asymmetric, creating a rolling syncopation.”8
 After a solo exhibition at Joan Washburn Gallery in 1972, Fine had three solo exhibitions of her Accordment paintings at Andre Zarre Gallery in 1973, 1976, and 1977. Reviewing her 1973 exhibition in Arts Magazine, art critic, Edgar Buonagurio compares Perle Fine’s Accordment Series to Edouard Monet’s series of Water Lilies, “these are gentle paintings of near unspeakable beauty . . . with an elusive ethereal light.”9
1. David Deitcher, Perle Fine: Major Works: 1954–1978 (East Hampton, New York: Guild Hall Museum, 1978.) n.p.
2. Kathleen L. Housley, Tranquil Power: The Art and Life of Perle Fine (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2005). p. 215.
3. Ibid. p. 216.
4. Ibid. p. 215.
5. Deitcher, n.p.
6.Vivian Raynor, “On the Edge of Color,” The New York Times, November 25, 1977.
7. Peter Frank, “Art Review Perle Fine at Andre Zarre,” The Village Voice, 1978.
8. Housley, p. 216.
9. Edgar Buonagurio, “Perle Fine” Arts Magazine, February 1973.

Opening Reception : Thursday, February 13, 2020 6 - 8 pm 

mpefm USA art press release