NEW YORK, NY.- Photographed in about 1924 or 1925, Ethel Kremer—then in her twenties—is dressed in the height of women’s fashions in Paris and New York. [1] She wears a fur-trimmed wide-shouldered wrap coat and a beret-style turban hat. Lacking feathers and frills, her attire gives off a masculine aspect, while her relaxed pose conveys her androgynous persona: she slouches on a diagonal and holds a cigarette, while gazing both toward and past the photographer, whose identity is unknown. She is at once sophisticated and bohemian, guarded and self-confident, outward and inward. The photograph captures the complexity of an artist (who became Ethel Schwabacher after her marriage in 1935) driven constantly by a search in her life and art to find and understand her identity—as a woman, artist, and American—in relation to the tide-breaking ideas and events of the second half of the twentieth century.

Schwabacher was at the center of the New York art world from the 1940s through the 1960s. She was represented by Betty Parsons Gallery, the leading showcase for the avant-garde, where she had five solo exhibitions and was in fourteen group shows. Her friends and acquaintances included leading artists of the era. In addition to painting, she was a skilled writer and published her first book, in 1957, on the life and work of her friend and mentor Arshile Gorky (1904–1948). Her authentic and interpretive account emphasized how Gorky’s Surrealist method, stressing a “freedom from the purely conscious,” was of foundational significance to the Abstract Expressionist movement.[2] She also wrote extensively on the nature of art and on the work of other artists, including the painter John Charles Ford (1929–2014).

Schwabacher was at the center of the New York art world from the 1940s through the 1960s. She was represented by Betty Parsons Gallery, the leading showcase for the avant-garde, where she had five solo exhibitions and was in fourteen group shows. Her friends and acquaintances included leading artists of the era. In addition to painting, she was a skilled writer and published her first book, in 1957, on the life and work of her friend and mentor Arshile Gorky (1904–1948). Her authentic and interpretive account emphasized how Gorky’s Surrealist method, stressing a “freedom from the purely conscious,” was of foundational significance to the Abstract Expressionist movement. [2]

Schwabacher was featured in Whitney Museum annuals almost every year between 1949 and 1963. Committed to the Civil Rights movement, she actively opposed segregation in the 1950s and 1960s and expressed the battle for a just humanity as a mythic and epic event in her art. In 1987, a traveling retrospective of her work was organized by the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. It was curated by the art history professors Greta Berman (Juilliard School) and Mona Hadler (Brooklyn College, City University of New York), both of whom contributed to the show’s catalogue. Schwabacher’s daughter Brenda S. Webster and the poet Judith Emlyn Johnson were the co-editors of a volume containing excerpts from the journal she kept from 1967 to 1980, Hungry for Light, published in 1993 by Indiana University Press, Bloomington. In 2016–17, Schwabacher was among the twelve artists included in the landmark traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, organized by the Denver Art Museum. Belonging to the first generation of Abstract Expressionist women artists, Schwabacher achieved recognition and respect in the New York art world for both her work and her intellect.

Schwabacher’s works belong to numerous museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota; the Mint Museum, North Carolina; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut.