Perle Fine: Abstract Expressionist Who Broke Barriers Gets Renewed Attention

Key facts

• Perle Fine was born in 1905 and decided early on to become an artist.
• She studied illustration and graphic design in Boston before moving to New York to study painting at the Art Students League.
• She later took classes with German émigré Hans Hoffmann, who promoted abstract painting.
• In the early 1940s, her work was shown at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery and the Museum of Nonobjective Painting (now the Guggenheim Museum).
• She was one of the few women in “The Club,” founded in 1949 and led by Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning; other members included Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner.
• Her work is held in major U.S. collections, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the National Gallery of Art.
• In the 1950s she created the Prescience Series, exploring layered paint, stains, transparency, and meditative color effects.
• The Cool Series (1961–1963) broke from action painting, using simple compositions of rectangles and squares with one or two colors.
• Recent exhibitions featuring women Abstract Expressionists include shows at the Denver Art Museum (2016), Setareh Gallery (2019), and the Whitney Museum (2021–2022).