100 Artists
THE ARTIST R B Kitaj wrote about his wife Sandra Fisher thus: “She came into my life in 1970 as a passionate Jewishness began to form crazily in me. She seemed like a shining California miracle of new-old Jewish womanhood invented in the diaspora.”
Fisher appears in Kitaj’s work as the Shekhinah — a Kabbalistic expression of the female divine spirit. But she was far more than a muse, she was a painter and printmaker whose work had broad appeal. Years after Fisher’s death Germaine Greer wrote: “She was one of the first women painters to succeed in painting the male nude as an object of desire. Her boys lie spread-eagled on tumbled sheets, their flushed skin bathed in the golden luminosity of summer afternoons.”
Sandra Fisher was born in 1947 in New York into a Jewish family, the elder of two daughters of Gene Sapiro Fisher, a builder, and his wife, Ethel Blankfield Kott, a painter. In 1961 her mother left the family to travel in Europe, subsequently obtaining a divorce. Fisher moved to Los Angeles and studied art, graduating in 1968. In 1970 she was appointed assistant to the director and master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini GEL, an iconic Los Angeles-based artists’ workshop and publisher of limited edition prints and sculptures. At Gemini, she met the artists Robert Irwin and R. B. Kitaj. During this period, she became reunited with her mother, who now lived and painted in Los Angeles.
After she moved to London in 1971, Fisher and Kitaj began to live together. They married in December 1983 at the Bevis Marks Synagogue, and their son Max was born the following year. As an artist, Fisher worked to a predetermined schedule, alternating days devoted to compositions involving her models (many of whom were dancers, actors and musicians) with portraits of friends. She collaborated with other artists, often working in tandem in each other’s studios. Fisher usually worked on a small scale and was often able to finish a painting in only one or two sessions, although there was nothing fast or casual in her approach.
Her painting Boating on Regent’s Park (1988) was used for the Days on the Water poster series commissioned by London Underground and became its most popular image. Towards the end of her life, the direction of Fisher’s art was changing, although she was unable to complete several important projects, including a series of theatrical works destined for the Globe Theatre on Bankside.
Sandra Fisher died in London on 19 September 1994 after a sudden illness.