Ethel Fisher's 'Synthesis of Form and Color' at LewAllen Galleries shows a modernist artist's struggle to find her voice

SANTA FE — It’s always admirable when a gallery brings renewed attention to an under-appreciated woman artist, and Ethel Fisher (1923–2017) is an artist worth seeing. Sadly, she was also an artist who never quite found her voice, though her paintings show glimmers of unrealized greatness.

“Synthesis of Form and Color” at LewAllen Galleries presents abstract compositions Fisher made in and around the year 1957 when she was living in Miami. They look a lot like the stuff Arshile Gorky was making in the 1930s and Lee Krasner and Robert Motherwell were making in the early 1940s before those three arrived at their mature styles, back when they and other nascent abstract expressionists were still doing mishmashes of French synthetic cubism and Russian cubo-futurism. Fisher’s compositions also bear a resemblance to those of Cuban neo-cubist Wifredo Lam, who was widely exhibited in Miami.

But just because Fisher is using a prefabricated language doesn’t mean she’s not still doing interesting things with it. Her colors and shapes are delightfully weird in ways that anticipate the irreverent abstractions of people like Mary Heilmann and Elizabeth Murray in the 1970s.

“Synthesis” is the second exhibition of Fisher’s work at LewAllen Galleries, which has an exclusive relationship with the artist’s estate.

Last year’s show, which focused on Fisher’s portraits from the 1960s and ’70s, was inexplicably titled “Portraits of the Sublime” even though Fisher had said she was interested in “intimacy and alienation” in those works, the polar opposite of “the sublime.” Those portraits were clearly indebted to Alex Katz, and some of them even “out-Alex Katzed” Alex Katz, in the sense that her background colors were even more saturated than his and her sitters even more depressed.

Similarly, Fisher’s abstract paintings in “Synthesis,” although derivative, are more engaging than most other mid-century, quasi-cubist art. She may be reinventing the wheel, but she’s also letting it spin.

Fisher wasn’t afraid to mix and match modalities, either. In “Burnt Offering” (1959), she covers the left half of the canvas with Alma Thomas-style conjoined staccato marks that suggest the charred exterior of a campfire log with magenta embers glowing within — or is the whole thing a faux cheetah print? The right side is more cubist and includes indeterminate shapes reminiscent of a cartoon cat head and a toothpick-impaled martini olive. The two unruly halves of the composition meet in the middle, forming an uneasy truce.

“Marrakesh” (1957) employs a Moorish color palette and slightly curving geometric shapes reminiscent of the Moroccan city’s antique, heavily plastered walls and alleyways. The most exciting passage in “Marrakesh” is a narrow rectangle on the right, into which a jumble of orange and yellow marks seem to have settled like furniture thrown from a window. If that portion were enlarged into a painting of its own, it would be veritably indistinguishable from a Heilmann.

Perhaps if Fisher had kept up with what younger generations of artists — especially women artists — were doing to deconstruct and reinvent abstract painting in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, she could have contributed to the burgeoning discourse around conceptual abstraction. Regrettably, she had abandoned abstraction entirely by then.

In “Synthesis,” we see a playful colorist struggling to express her personality within the stifling confines of a male-dominated, Eurocentric tradition that had already grown stale. What we get is not an explosion, not a deconstruction, but merely a “synthesis,” as the exhibition title perhaps unwittingly acknowledges. There are moments of inspired rebellion, sure, but on the whole these are dutiful homages to once-radical forms. No wonder Fisher got bored and started painting people instead — people who look as tired and trapped as she must have felt within abstraction.

Ethel Fisher's 'Synthesis of Form and Color' at LewAllen Galleries shows a modernist artist's struggle to find her voice