Poet in the Square

All her adult life, Isabel Bishop, 58, has been obsessed with the idea of movement, but she herself changes outwardly hardly at all. Each morning, as she has for the last 26 years, she leaves her Riverdale, N.Y. home with her husband, Neurologist Harold G. Wolff, and boards a train for Manhattan. At Grand Central, the doctor and the artist part, he to go north by subway to his office, she to go south to her studio on Union Square. There Isabel Bishop calmly takes command of a world she has made her own.

Last week her world was on view for the first time in five years at Manhattan's Midtown Galleries. In those five years, her output has been small, for she is a perfectionist who is merciless with herself. But her new drawings and eleven paintings are proof again of why she has won not only fame but an affection that is rare in a highly charged profession that often seems at war with itself.

A slender, birdlike woman with an enthusiasm that never runs down, Isabel Bishop was 16 when she started training for a career at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. At the time, she loathed the drudgery of "drawing, drawing, drawing," but she learned to be grateful for it. In 1934 she leased her present studio, and Union Square became her subject. She sketched the lounging bums ("America's only 'leisure class' "), drew the men and women hurrying past a drugstore, or bending over a fountain to get a quick drink, or just eating a hotdog. The waitresses and working girls about the square had a special fascination, for they, too, represented movement. In the U.S., says Isabel Bishop, giving an artist's nod to sociology, the working girl has no intention of standing still: she is determined to move up in the world, and "all her children will go to college." As the years passed, the Bishop Girl became a kind of trademark.

More recently, Artist Bishop has become increasingly fascinated by the subway. "Why? I wish I knew! But here people are always going or coming. This is not a place to stay; there is always movement." She can give the Union Square station some of the mystery of a cathedral; yet her people make their entrances and exits, and the trains rush in and out again, and life moves on. Her problem is what it has always been: how to catch the fleeting moment without freezing its flight. Isabel Bishop's brush creates a vibrant shimmer and veils her everyday dramas in a magic mist that evokes a sense of timelessness.

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