Painting My World: The Art of Dorothy Eisner

Dorothy Eisner (1906-1984) was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades. She studied at the Art Students League from 1925-29 with Boardman Robinson, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Thomas Hart Benton. She worked constantly on her own track, with occasional explorations of fields or 'schools' of art through most of the twentieth century, in her studio in Greenwich Village, in the mountains of North Carolina, the valleys and rivers of Montana, and the coast of Maine. Her paintings reflect both her own past and her passionate interest in all art. Dorothy Eisner was born in 1906 and became dedicated to drawing and painting for life at the outset of the 1920s. By the l930s, a period when women artists found it difficult to achieve recognition, she exhibited frequently and was an active participant in the New York art community. Her close circle of friends included Walker Evans who she painted in the forties, as he photographed her work in the sixties. In 1937, she travelled to Coyoacán, Mexico, with a number of American intellectuals on the anti-Stalinist left, to participate in the American philosopher John Dewey's Commission of Inquiry into the charges made against Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. She painted two portraits of Trotsky as well as a painting of the entire Commission - including Trotsky and the celebrated Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. She wrote that she was never a 'social realist,' but 'did still lifes and lifes not so still.' After the War, she worked with Jack Tworkov and experimented with abstract expressionism. She found her vision as an artist in the 1970s and 1980s with boldly expressed and brilliantly colourful works. This book is a beautiful exploration of her life and work. 78 colour & 55 b/w illustrations