Perle Fine, American (1905 – 1988)

Perle Fine was committed to abstraction throughout her Fifty-year career. She maintained high ideals, never adopting a method to follow a trend or compromise her work when it was outside the mainstream.

Although she experienced the barriers that limited the opportunities for women artists in the era—especially those who entered 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 achievements and those of other women of her time are now being given serious attention, such as in the June–September 2016, exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, held at the Denver Art Museum. The show, including Fine’s work along with that of Mary Abbott, Jay DeFeo, Judith Godwin, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Deborah Remington, and Ethel Schwabacher, was curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit, who wrote the accompanying catalogue.

Fine was also represented in the exhibition, Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, held at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University in 2017. Also Postwar Women, at the Art Students League, New York in 2019, Sparking Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show, at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York in 2019 - 2020, Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2019 – 2020, and part of the exhibition, What We See, How We See, at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York in 2020 – 2021.