Abstract:
Biala (1903-2000) was a Polish-born American painter known in Paris and New York for her sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. During her eight-decade career, her work was characterized by a modernist reinterpretation of classical themes of landscapes, still life, and portraiture, animated gesturally with punctuated brush work held fast by her keen eye for observation.

As an immigrant arriving from a Russian-occupied Poland to a Jewish tenement house on the Lower East Side in New York in 1913, Biala, then Janice Tworkov, faced a new culture and adolescence at the same time. Decamping to Greenwich Village with her older brother, Jack Tworkov, she became immersed in a bohemian life. Like Jack, Janice was an avid reader; The Three Musketeers was her favorite book. She would later tell French novelist and art theorist Andre? Malraux that it was because of Porthos that she became an artist.