Janet Fish, Painter of Luminous Still Lifes, Dies at 87

Janet Fish, Painter of Luminous Still Lifes, Dies at 87

Janet Fish, known for her radiant, light-infused still lifes of everyday objects, died at her home in Vermont on December 11. She was eighty-seven. Her death was announced by DC Moore Gallery, which represents her. As rendered by Fish, bottles of window-cleaning fluid, jars of honey, plastic-wrapped trays of fruit, and glass vases bursting with flowers appeared to glow from within, conjuring a sense of exuberance and possibility. In Fish’s work, “the humble hard facts of secular life are softened, almost mystically melted, transubstantiated into sacred objects,” wrote Donald Kuspit in a2016 issue ofArtforum.

“I see light as energy,” Fish said, “and energy is always moving through us. I don’t see things as being separated—I don’t paint the objects I paint one after the other. I paint through the painting.”

Janet Fish was born on May 8, 1938, in Boston. Her mother was a sculptor, a grandfather was a painter, and an uncle was a woodcarver. When she was ten, her family moved to Bermuda, whose lush landscape she would credit with influencing her practice and cultivating her interest in light. After earning her BA at Smith College, she enrolled in the MFA program at Yale, where she studied alongside Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, and Sylvia Mangold. In 1963, Fish moved to New York, where she made the interaction between light and plastic or glass her subject, painting in a realistic fashion that went against the Abstract Expressionism then in vogue.

“When I first got to New York, I was simply trying to figure out what I wanted painting to be,” she told the Art Students League in 2009. “ I threw some apples down on the table and started painting them.… I began enlarging the things and then focusing more on the object than on the surroundings. I went from that to painting packages, supermarket things. I liked the way the plastic was going over the solid objects, and I liked how it broke the forms up.”

Nodding to Pop art’s fascination with mass-produced items, Fish’s work of the 1960s and 1970s featured arrangements of mundane objects, often placed in front of a window of her sixth-floor SoHo walkup. There, in the streaming light, she strove to depict the shimmering nuances of water in a tumbler or street reflections in a pair of eyeglasses. “It’s really as much painting life as anything else…because it’s not dead,” she said in 1968. “Things aren’t dead. The light is through everything and energy through everything.” Works such as Smucker’s Jelly Glasses, 1973, and Beer and Brandy Glasses, 1975, bore out her words, their depicted liquid reflections seeming almost to vibrate.

In 1979, she moved to Vermont, where she began incorporating figures into her work and painting landscapes. Favoring a long, horizontal format, she crowded her canvases with tableaus of abundance and conviviality, often featuring reflective surfaces. In Birthday, 1999, for example, a cut-glass punch bowl, shiny Mylar balloons, and stacks of plastic cups wrapped in bright cellophane foreground a sunny scene of young children playing.

Fish stopped painting in 2009, owing to physical limitations. Her work is held in the collections of major art institutions throughout the US, including the Dallas Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; the National Gallery of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.