Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to present a survey of paintings by Anne Tabachnick. Spanning a period of 30 years beginning in the early 1960’s, the exhibition brings together the primary concerns with which Tabachnick grappled during her prolific career, and addresses three of the major subjects which were the focus of her compositions: still life, figuration, and landscape.

The earliest works on view have at their crux the synthesis of the objects of daily life—fruit on a table, paintings in the studio—with the flattened out, inverted Matissean space and push-pull color Tabachnick investigated in the 1960’s and 70’s. Over time, Tabachnick’s exploration of these compositional principles relaxed to give way to greater emotive feeling. Late works, such as Autumn Sky (1987-88) and Roseanne and Monica: Blue and Yellow (c. 1993) achieve a near equilibrium between figure and ground, abstraction and figuration, and the prominence of line versus color.

Anne Tabachnick was born in Derby, CT in 1927. Her formal art training at Hunter College, University of California, Berkeley, and the Hans Hofmann School was supplemented by studies with the painters Nell Blaine and William Baziotes. Tabachnick’s ever-evolving style drew life-long inspiration from the New York School, but was also heavily indebted to the “Grand Tradition” of European Masters: El Greco, Bonnard, Cézanne, and Matisse were among her favorites. Non-western sources, like Mai-Mai Sze’s seventeenth century Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, were also pivotal in Tabachnick’s personal formulation of calligraphic drawing and vertical space.

Tabachnick’s many honors and awards include the Longview Foundation Award, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Fellowship, and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Throughout her life, Tabachnick was awarded numerous residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design, the Hyde Collection, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Tabachnick lived and worked in New York City until her death in 1995.