Biala (b. 1903; d. September 24, 2000) was a Polish born American painter well regarded in Paris and New York for her unique synthesis of techniques from the School of Paris and New York's Abstract Expressionists. During her eight-decade career, she approached classical themes of landscapes, still-life, and portraiture, with an animated, gestural style rooted in observation from life.

As an immigrant arriving from a Russian-occupied Poland to a Jewish tenement house on the Lower East Side in New York in 1913, Janice Tworkov came of age by facing a new culture and adolescence at the same time. Decamping to Greenwich Village with her older brother, Jack Tworkov, she became immersed in a bohemian life. Like her older brother, Janice was an avid reader, with The Three Musketeers being her favorite book. She would later tell French novelist and art theorist André Malraux that it was because of Porthos that she became an artist.

While visiting an exhibition of French painting at the Brooklyn Museum in the Spring of 1921, Janice discovered the work of Cézanne. She enrolled in classes at the Art Students League and the School of the National Academy of Design. In the fall of 1922, Janice became enamored with the work of Edwin Dickinson and decided to hitchhike her way to Provincetown to study with him in the summer of 1923. This would be the extent of her "formal" training.

By the late 1920s, Janice was an established artist and frequent exhibitor at New York’s G.R.D. Studios, a gallery that would later fuel the careers of many important American artists. Her participation in the fledging art colonies of Provincetown, MA and Woodstock, NY further bolstered her reputation and generated close friendships with the likes of Edward Dickinson, Dorothy Dehner, Lee Gatch, David Smith, and William Zorach. In fact, it was at the suggestion of Zorach that Janice changed her name to simply Biala, after the town where she was born, so as not to confuse her work with that of her brother.

During a fateful trip to Paris in 1930, Biala met and fell in love with the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. A formidable figure among writers, artists and the transatlantic intelligentsia, Ford introduced Biala to the many artists within his circle forging a new Modernism in France including Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Biala became the perfect representative of American bohemia in France. Upon Ford’s death in 1939, she fled Europe under the growing Nazi threat and in a harrowing feat rescued Ford’s personal library and manuscripts while carrying as much of her own work as she could.

Re-establishing herself in New York City, Biala became a fixture among the rising avant-garde artists living and working around Washington Square. She met and married Daniel “Alain” Brustlein, a noted illustrator for The New Yorker. While her work was represented by galleries rooted in European Modernism, namely the Bignou Gallery, she was one of the few women influencing the rising Abstract Expressionist movement in New York.

In October 1947, Biala and Brustlein board the de Grasse, one of the first transatlantic ships to sail to Europe after the war. They settled in Paris but began almost immediately traveling throughout Europe, encountering the histories of cities such as Rome and Pompeii. This was the beginning of a lifetime split between Paris and New York.

In April 1950 in New York City, Biala was one of only three women—the other two being Louise Bourgeois and Hedda Sterne—invited to attend a private and exclusive discussion known as the Artist’s Session at Studio 35. It is this meeting which historians credit as a defining moment in Post-War American history where artists gathered to define themselves. The Whitney Museum of American Art became the first public institution to acquire Biala’s work in 1955.

In April 1956, a feature article, Biala Paints a Picture, appeared in Art News with photographs by Rudy Burckhardt.

Biala continued to exhibit internationally during the final decades of her life. Major themes dominating the early part of these final decades include large sweeping landscapes featuring the shores of Provincetown or the sea circling Venice. A return to the architecture of Paris appears in a series of major paintings focused on Notre Dame. Themes of interiors as well as a return to compositions inspired by Velázquez dominate these later years. Her work from this period continued to meld abstraction with imagist concerns, and have been described as “intimate” and “alluring.”

In June 1989, The New York Times published Three Who Were Warmed by the City of Light by Michael Brenson featuring Biala, Joan Mitchell and Shirley Jaffe. Upon her death in 2000, her obituary appears in The New York Times written by Roberta Smith. Smith writes, “[her art] spanned two art capitals and several generations […] belonging to a trans-Atlantic tradition that included French painters like Matisse, Bonnard and Marquet, as well as Milton Avery and Edward Hopper.”

Major monographic exhibitions include: Denver Art Museum, Denver (‘37); Olivet College, Olivet (‘37); Hamline University Art Gallery, St. Paul, MN (’43); Musee de Beaux-Arts, Rennes (’62); Université de Provence, IEFEE, Aix-en-Provence, France (2009); Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Flushing, NY (2013).

Major group exhibition include: Parc des Expositions, Porte de Versailles, Paris (‘32), City Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (’44, ’45, ‘46); Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee (‘47), “Whitney Annual,” Whitney Museum of Art (’46, ’55, ’56, ‘59); The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (’47, ‘57); “Les Surindépendants,” Paris (’48, ’49, ’50, ’51, ‘52); “Prix de la Critique,” La Galerie Saint-Placide, Paris (’50); “The 145th Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture,” Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (’50); “Salon de Mai,” Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (’52); “Biala, Viera da Silva and Vera Pagava,” National Museum, Oslo, Norway (’52); Stable Annual, New York (’53, ’54); "Janice Biala, Edwin Dickinson and Jack Tworkov," HCE Gallery, Provincetown (’59); “La Peinture Francaise d’Aujourd’hui,” Association des Musée d’Israel: Musée de Tel-Aviv; Musée National ‘Bezalel’, Jerusalem; Musée de l’Art Moderne, Haifa, (’60-’61); “Whitney Annual,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (’61); “La Peau de l’Ours,” Kunsthalle Basel (’64); “10 Américains de Paris,” American Cultural Center, Berlin (’66); “Contemporary Portraits,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (’66); “Americans in Paris,” Centre George Pompidou, Paris (’77); La Famille des Portraits,” Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris (’80); “Permanence du Visage,” Musée Ingres, Montauban (’88); “Artistes Américains en France (1947-1997),” Mona Bismarck Foundation, Paris (’97); “Natures Mortes du XX Siecle,” Musée de Pontoise, Pontoise (’97); Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine, France (2008); “The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945,” Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2022); “Action / Gesture / Paint: a global story of women and abstraction 1940-70,” Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2023); “BURST! Abstract Painting After 1945,” Munchmuseet, Oslo, Norway (2023)

Awards include: Prix de la Critique (shared between André Minaux) (‘1949)