Not on view
Date
1931
Classification
Prints
Medium
Etching
Dimensions
Sheet (Irregular): 11 5/16 × 9 11/16in. (28.7 × 24.6 cm) Plate: 5 15/16 × 4in. (15.1 × 10.2 cm)
Accession number
80.31.142
Edition
Proof
Publication
Printed by Isabel Bishop
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Felicia Meyer Marsh Bequest
Rights and reproductions
© Estate of Isabel Bishop
API
artworks/3596
The two men pictured in Isabel Bishop's Conversation were likely Manhattanites, since the artist primarily found her subjects in New York's Union Square, which she could view from the studio she occupied for six decades. Yet her drawings, etchings, and paintings show familiar urban types as isolated from the city’s commotion. Bishop preferred depicting the solitary reverie and intimate conversations of career girls, young mothers, and unemployed men to the chaos and bustle of crowds. While The Conversation is an etching, it shares the intimations of movement and fluid lines of drawings, elements which allow Bishop to tease out the natural momentum of a gesture and explore the vitality of casual actions such as chatting, yawning, or drinking. When an idea engaged Bishop, she drew it over and over again, and the more laborious medium of etching was a way for her to verify, as she put it, whether there was "any idea in the drawing."