Biography of Perle Fine

Perle Fine working on the replica of Victory Boogie Woogie, Photo courtesy of Maurice Berezov © A.E. Artworks, LLC.

Boston-born Perle Fine (1905-1988) was a versatile artist who worked as a painter, illustrator, gallerist and teacher (at Cornell and other institutions). She was determined to become an artist from a young age, and left high school in order to attend art college.

After training in Boston she left for New York, paying no heed to the social conventions and traditional expectations that applied to young women at the time. There, she studied and worked with Hans Hofmann and other artists. From that point on, she worked in an abstract style.

Perle was one of few women to become a member of the American Abstract Artists in New York. Willem de Kooning also invited her to join 'The Club', an artists’ association on 8th Street.

She had a strong affinity for music, and often used musical terms like rhythm and harmony to describe abstract art. The titles of her paintings – 'Staccato', 'Polyphonic' and 'Study for Downbeat', for example – also suggest that Fine associated the acoustic with the visual.

In 1946 Emily Hall Tremaine (1908-1987) – a woman of vision – commissioned Fine to make two replicas of Victory Boogie Woogie. Fine rose to the challenge with unflagging devotion. She studied the colour and the rhythm of the work, and also made charts that revealed how Mondrian looked and what movements he wished to recreate.

As a highly regarded artist in her own right, Fine also showed her work at venues like Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery and Hilla Rebay's Museum of Non-objective Painting.