Adelie Landis Bischoff (February 12, 1926 – July 23, 2019), was an American artist and painter, active in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was the wife of artist Elmer Bischoff.
Adelie Landis worked as a psychiatric nurse at McLean Hospital from 1947 to 1948, before she moved to California to pursue a career in art.[2] Landis Bischoff was considered an artist of the San Francisco Abstract Expressionist movement,[3] but she also worked in the Bay Area Figurative Movement.[4][5][6] "I never got into the drip and blob," she later said of expressionism. "I think it took more nerve than I had at the time."[2] Landis Bischoff's work was exhibited in San Francisco and New York in 2006,[4][7] in Belmont in 2012,[5][8] and included in a 2014 show, "Beauty Fierce as Stars, Groundbreaking Women Painters 1950s and Beyond" in Berkeley, California.[9]
Landis Bischoff's home was burned in the Oakland firestorm of 1991.[10][11] The fire destroyed thousands of her and her late husband's drawings, photographs, notebooks, and diaries. "It was a kind of epiphany. I felt a surge of freedom to just leave it, to walk out and leave everything," she recalled later.[2] She built a new home in Oakland, designed by architect Stanley Saitowitz,[12] and continued painting and exhibiting new works into her late eighties.[1]
Personal life and legacy
Adelie Landis married fellow artist Elmer Nelson Bischoff in 1962.[13] Their son, David Bischoff, became a sculptor and writer. She was widowed when Elmer died from cancer in 1991; she died in 2019, aged 93 years, in Berkeley.
^Jones, Caroline A.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; San Francisco Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1990). Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965. University of California Press. ISBN978-0-520-06842-1.
^Berkson, Bill. Adelie Landis Bischoff (exhibit catalog, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York 2006).
