The paintings and sculptures of Lilly Fenichel have long been celebrated in America, but the artist beloved by the Beat Generation had to wait until now to get her first solo show in the UK. Only what she would have expected – despite already being hailed a star in the 50s, the abstract expressionist had to turn to Hollywood 20 years later to make ends meet in an era when this school of contemporary art was very much a boys’ club.
Born in 1927 to a fashion designer and a doctor, Fenichel fled Nazi Vienna with her family and after touching down briefly in the UK settled in California, where she studied painting before moving to New York and was immediately accepted into a rarefied circle by Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Highly-rated enough to be teaching others at the Museum of Modern Art, she struggled to support herself and she returned to Hollywood, where she parlayed her talents into art direction and costume design, most famously creating the gowns for Liza Minelli and her co-stars in the 1975 film Lucky Lady.
Considered part of the LA Cool School in California, she got to mingle with west coast artists such as Ed Ruscha, Rudi Gernreich and positively Jewish starchitect Frank Gehry, who described her as “sexy, seductive, extraordinarily talented and one of the smartest women I have ever known”. Aldous Huxley and Noel Harrison were also fans, but it was New Mexico which became her spiritual home and where she settled until her death in 2016 at 89. Her work is in permanent collections at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the New Mexico art colony where she lived, and nearby Albuquerque, where she died.
Artwork by Lily Fenichel
Finally gaining posthumous recognition with British curators in 2023, her work was shown with other female abstract expressionists overlooked in their lifetime at the Whitechapel Gallery, and later at the Gazelli Art House in Mayfair. It is this gallery which has honoured her with the one-woman show Against The Grain, which runs until 15 March.
