JAMES BISHOP, AN AMERICAN HERMIT
IN BLÄ’VY
by Gwenaël Kerlidou, February 5, 2026
​
“To Continue Painting” Timothy Taylor Gallery, 01/15-02/28​
Untitled, 1961-62, oil on canvas, 51 x 55 in, courtesy the artist estate and Timothy Taylor, © 2026 James Bishop.
Too few and far between, James Bishop’s exhibitions in New York are always an event and this one is no exception. The artist’s previous show in the city was at David Zwirner in the fall of 2014. In 2021, the year he died, he was the subject of an issue of “Transatlantique”, a periodical which brought together eight European and American artists around their understanding of his legacy (a project of historian Molly Warnock, who also curated the present show.)
​
The current presentation at Timothy Taylor’s offers a selection of works from the sixties to the eighties, a sort of abridged version of the full survey which still remains to be assembled by a US museum. The only institutional survey of Bishop’s work in his lifetime was organized by Swiss curator Dieter Schwarz in 1993-94, traveling in Europe from Winterthur (Switzerland) to Paris (France) and Münster (Germany).
​
It must be pointed in passing that, as with the previous show at Zwirner, on this occasion the gallery walls were repainted in a warm off-white color, which in contrast discreetly enhance the cool whites in Bishop’s paintings; a subtle kind of staging that may not be noticed at first sight (more on this later.)
​
The arc of his stylistic evolution is fairly unique. Bishop is this rare painter who moved seamlessly from post-Motherwell Abstract Expressionism in the early sixties, to Postminimalism in the seventies, to provisional painting in the eighties (as defined by Raphael Rubinstein), with its elliptic lack of resolution. Although that apparent indetermination was already present in some of his paintings on paper of the sixties, at the beginning of the eighties, in smaller works on paper which often seem like critical commentaries on his bigger paintings, what had been until then a method of constructing and deconstructing a surface slowly begins to assume a role of self-referential image. In this evolution, stylistic phases blend into each other as smoothly as the divided squares of his paintings fade into each other and into the background.
​
The artist was famously elliptical about his work and his work could be just as elusive to any rigid attempt at interpretation. He appeared to be equally indifferent to, or equally distanced from both the French and the American narratives about this work and to be able to simultaneously negotiate almost opposite views of his work.
​
Even if Bishop is first and foremost an American painter, it might be somewhat difficult to wrap one’s head around his work without taking into account the interest it received in Paris right from the beginning of his career. If he professed to hate the city, Bishop found there a measure of recognition and a community of interest which likely played a crucial role in his decision to settle in France. It is significant that the artist repeated the distance that he had intentionally kept with New York with another kind of self-imposed exile from Paris when he moved to Blévy, a hamlet twenty miles North of Chartres, where he lived from 1973 until his death as a kind of hermit in the middle of nowhere.
​
Marcelin Pleynet, then one of the most articulate critical voice about abstract painting in Paris, in an interesting exchange of ideas with William Rubin, then curator in chief at Moma (published by Editions du chêne, Paris, 1977, under the title “Paris - New York, situation de l’art”, p. 98, untranslated in English, unfortunately), summed up the importance of James Bishop’s work for a younger generation of French painters (i.e., the Supports/Surfaces generation): “… I think it’s quite clear … that there’s a painter, who has long been living in France, … and who’ll have an enormous influence on these young painters spurring them to go deeper into, to return to color, to the question of the color field. It’s a painter whose influence is still very discreet but indisputable, and that’s James Bishop, with the series of exhibitions that he’s been having regularly in France and Europe in the last few years. About the determination of many artists to turn to the sublimating possibilities of color, this is, I think, a point that can’t be circumvented …” (my translation)
​
The French painters and intellectuals, who were beginning to formulate their own critique of American abstraction in those years, found deep resonance in his work. For example, Marc Devade’s concept of “the gesture of color” (by which he meant color as inscription of the subject’s subconscious onto the surface) and his large ink paintings from 1972 to 1978 are unthinkable without his understanding of the example of Bishop’s work. Devade was also one of only two Supports/Surfaces members (the other being Vincent Bioulès) to hold onto the traditional stretcher rather than use the unstretched canvas more typical of the group’s work.
Marc Devade exhibition, installation view, Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery, Luxembourg, 2023, courtesy Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery.
Together with Simon Hantaï’s internalization of gesture in the folding of the canvas, Bishop’s internalization of it in the sliding/fading of paint, created a “double whammy” of complementing approaches which proved instrumental to the elaboration of an esthetics of deconstruction in the early days of Supports/Surfaces. It also happens that Bishop and Hantaï were both showing with Jean Fournier at the time, and so was Viallat.
​
First published on the occasion of a one-person show Galerie Jean Fournier in 1971, Marcelin Pleynet, « la couleur au carré, les rides, le dessein » remains perhaps the most attentive essay on Bishop’s work from the seventies. For my translation of that seminal text, please click the following link: https://d3zr9vspdnjxi.cloudfront.net/sites/gwenael1/sup/10392063-Pleynet-J-intro-and-translation.pdf
​
As interesting as it is, Pleynet’s text doesn’t address the impact of Motherwell’s work on the early Bishop, and via Motherwell, of the echoes of Surrealism in his work, of the role of the unconscious, and of the painted Freudian slip. Some works from the early sixties still evoke the brushed blotches of the Elegies series, others, with their exposed charcoal/pencil lines, the Open series.
​
Bishop distinguished himself from the other New York based painters of his generation on two significant points: His taking into account of Surrealism’s importance and his allegiance to oil paint. It is by re-examining the interpretation of Surrealism by their Ab Ex predecessors that Bishop and Hantaï were able to bypass the formalist dead ends of Clement Greenberg’s blanket dismissal of Surrealism.
​
Following the path of the thin, liquid paint (as opposed to the thick paint of the expressionists as surplus of meaning) might also be useful to make sense of his itinerary: Beyond Motherwell, one may even want to go back to Arshile Gorky’s pencil lines and oil washes. From the precedents of Arshile Gorky in the US and of Bram van Velde in Paris, thinned paint is a constant in Bishop’s work right from the beginning.
​
To trace the emergence of “the gesture of color” (or rather the gesture of paint), one has to go back to how Surrealist automatic writing/drawing was processed by the Ab Ex generation, which sublimated it into gesture, either in Pollock’s drippings, or at the other end of the spectrum, in Motherwell’s remanent, psychic image, and after them of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis’ poured paint method. Bishop distanced himself from both approaches and was able to avoid the heroic demonstrative dimension of American Existentialism by absorbing Bram van Velde’s humbler, more subdued version of it. Where in van Velde’s work gesture and the drips of diluted paint that it generates were kept separate from each other, in Bishop’s they are brought together in one single move; gesture is internalized within the liquid paint. (For more on Bishop’s interest in van Velde see my two-parts article published by Hyperallergic Weekend in 2015.) https://hyperallergic.com/failure-as-success-in-painting-bram-van-velde-the-invisible-part-1/ and https://hyperallergic.com/failure-as-success-in-painting-bram-van-velde-the-invisible-part-2/
​​
Untitled, 1985-87, oil on paper, 7-7/8 x 8-1/4 in, courtesy the artist estate and Timothy Taylor, © 2026 James Bishop.
Hours, 1963, oil on canvas, 50 x 51.5 in, courtesy the artist estate and Timothy Taylor, © 2026 James Bishop.
If Bram van Velde sometimes looked like a character straight out of a Samuel Beckett play, for his part Bishop could easily come across as a protagonist in a story by Maurice Blanchot, the famously reclusive post-war French writer, himself an expert at self-disappearance in his own right.
​
In 1966, after his first visit to the US in 8 years, Bishop distanced himself from the Ab Ex legacy of Robert Motherwell and progressively adopted the deductive structure advocated by Frank Stella’s black paintings, seemingly combining it with the poured paint method of Frankenthaler and Louis. One may wonder why, after discovering their work, he didn’t switch to an acrylic/water-based paint. Besides the fact that this kind of paint wasn’t yet widely available for artists in France at the time, it is his devotion to oil paint which begs for attention. More than its fluidity, it is the oil paint’s viscosity which interested bishop and without which he couldn’t have achieved the kind of layering and slow moving of the paint across the surface that he was looking for.
​
As Pleynet points out, the hard surface of the commercially available pre-primed white grounds is what Bishop was interested in, not the absorbing qualities of Frankenthaler and Louis’ raw cotton canvas. This interest in the ready-made nature of his grounds, combined with the staging of the gallery’s painted walls, summing up together a singular awareness that painting is based on a constellation of codes and conventions, cannot but bring to our post-postmodern minds Thierry de Duve’s discussion, in his essay “The Monochrome and the blank canvas”, of Greenberg’s precept that an “unpainted canvas is already a painting, albeit not a satisfying one” from Duchamp’s perspective (surely an unintended consequence, from the artist’s point of view). From there one could easily expand the argument to include painters as different from each other as Claude Rutault or Bernard Frize, for the way one relates the monochrome to the wall (by painting them both the same color), or the way in which, in the other’s work, the white ground of the painting has become one of its un-examined pre-conditions.
​
There is no question that spending most of his life abroad hindered Bishop’s American career as well as the understanding of his work within the American narrative. But, with each (still too rare) new exhibition in New York, his stature as a significant figure grows ever more. Let’s hope that, eventually, the New York art world will come to see him as the artist of equal relevance and standing as other major recognized American painters of his generation, such as Robert Ryman, Brice Marden or Marcia Hafif, that he is.
Limited, 1971, oil on canvas, 77 x 77 in, courtesy the artist estate and Timothy Taylor, © 2026 James Bishop.