Nessim, Barbara (1939—)

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Nessim, Barbara (1939—)

American painter and illustrator . Born on March 30, 1939, in New York City; graduated from the High School of Industrial Arts (now called High School of Art and Design), 1956; Pratt Institute, New York, B.F.A., 1960; studied painting at the Art Students League; married in 1980.

Influenced by her clothing-designer mother, illustrator and painter Barbara Nessim knew from an early age that she wanted to be an artist. In the seventh grade, she was enrolled in an art class for gifted students, and in the ninth grade she broke her leg and could not attend school, so she pursued her art training at home. "I had some instruction that included three hours of regular education and three hours of art a week.…I learned how to learn," Nessim later explained in an interview. "During that time I had a teacher, June Howard Mahl , who taught me the basics of art, like working with black and white and gray.…I learned stippling, drawing from what was in your pocketbook, and how to break down shapes and forms. That's what really got me focused." At Mahl's suggestion, she later attended the High School of Industrial Art, where she took as many art courses as academics.

Graduating in 1956, Nessim enrolled at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, where she studied illustration and painting under Fritz Eichenberg, Jacob Landau, and Richard Lindner. She then won a scholarship to a summer program at Pratt Graphic Center, where she was a student of Michel Ponce de Leon. Here, Nessim began producing a new kind of linear etchings with applied local color ("monotype etchings," she called them), which were indicative of her penchant for bending the "rules." Nessim credits her friend and teacher Bob Weaver with helping her relate her art to her thoughts. He went through her sketchbooks with her, page by page, helping her to understanding exactly what she was doing. "I was tracking my thoughts," she said later. "I was doing my work as a subconscious effort, and it was coming out as a conscious thing. There were certain things in my books that were very narrative, were explaining my life to me. Certain feelings that I had about looking at the world through a man's eyes, or how women and men related to each other."

Nessim's off-beat outline technique and often grotesque imagery hardly conformed to the requisites of commercial art at the time, and so she had trouble finding illustrating jobs. "I was too weird for regular magazines; I was too strange," she recalled. (Henry Wolf was one exception, using her work occasionally for Show magazine.) Most of her early assignments were with Playboy-type magazines, and even they were infrequent. To supplement her income, she also worked as a textile designer, doing plaids, stripes, and colorings. After three years, upon the advice of friends who insisted she was more of a fine artist than an illustrator, she began painting, recording on canvas the same themes of female imagery and women's relationship to the world that had driven her drawings and prints.

Eight years after graduation, Nessim was still having trouble finding work as an illustrator, even though her paintings were winning awards and her work was influencing other artists. But although she tried to bend her hard-edge vision into something more acceptable, her illustrations simply did not complement storytelling in the usual way. "Even though I thought of my work as narrative, it's only in a very sub-conscious way. It's not narrative as in 'now I'm going to tell you a story,' but it twists and turns and bends." Around this time, Nessim became friendly with art director Uli Boege, who was also an artist. He taught her how to translate her personal symbols into pictures that would better represent a story; he also showed her how to subtly alter her style so that art directors and editors could better relate to it. Although it was a frustrating experience, Nessim learned to control and change the symbols in her work to make them more understandable to the reader. By the early 1970s, she was working for New York magazine, and her success accelerated throughout the decade, partly due to the advent of Ms. magazine and the women's movement, which, according to Nessim, is what she is all about. From that time on, her work has appeared in most of the major magazines,

From 1967, Nessim has combined teaching with her other work, holding positions at the School for Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, and Parsons School of Design. "I teach the basics of illustration," she says, "how to get a concept. I also teach a little bit about business. I try to demystify this hocus-pocus." In 1980, Nessim also became involved in computer art, which she uses in conjunction with her other work, not as a replacement. "It's a tool and a medium all in one, which is historic," she says. "It responds to you. You can make a 'family tree' off of your original work. I coined that phrase because I can't think of anything more appropriate—you're branching off the original and after many stages, you still have that original image intact."