the Prodigy

Anya Fisher

American Expressionist
Poet
Teacher

B/D
1905—1992

SEE ARTWORK

“Anya was more than my art teacher she was my most inspirational mentor, she encouraged individualism and was an outspoken champion of individual rights, continually fighting for social justice while philosophizing the importance of finding and staying true to oneself. She believed that school ruined you as an artist and each student would do well to break free from basic art training,”

— Shannon LeBaw-O’Sullivan, Anya’s former art student.

Anya Fisher, nee Anya Mikhailovna Lieberzon was born in Odessa, Russia (Ukraine) in 1905 to a wealthy Russian family. By the age of five, she received acclaim as a child prodigy, playing piano with adults. She later attended the Music Conservatory in Odessa, however, during 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution her father was brutally massacred. Anya and her sister heroically escaped the Bolsheviks by swimming across the Black Sea and eventually, they fled to Minnesota to live with an uncle where Anya continued to study music and played with the Minnesota Symphony. Although she was accepted into the acclaimed Fontainebleau Music Conservatory, the lack of substantive funds prevented her from traveling and relocating. Consequently, she moved to New York where she met her first husband and became absorbed in the spirit of the bohemian art culture in Greenwich Village. Frowning upon her curiosities, art, and cultural interests, Anya left her husband and moved to San Francisco where she met the love of her life Eddie Fisher and became an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. The two moved to Los Angeles where in 1947 Anya became a serious art student, privately studying with avant-garde painter Rico Lebrun and year later she began her studies at the Jepson Institute where her work garnered high accolades. By 1951 Anya had an MFA and worked at LACMA for a year to fund her attendance at the Academie Grand Chaumiere in 1952.

Side-profile portrait of Anya Fisher, American Expressionist artist.

When Anya returned to America after her studies abroad, she was loathe to find that there was very little interest in women painters exhibiting their work. Along with painting she began teaching art and was part of and helped to build the cultural milieu teeming through southern California in the 1950s, notably Pasadena and Alta Dena. More than likely, through inference and circumstance, both she and Cameron as women artists of their time, crossed paths.

“Her aspirations were always to be free. She walked into the room with a strong presence; she was fascinating and flamboyant, smoking long cigarettes, and spoke with a smoker’s voice,” reminisces Shannon LeBaw-O’Sullivan.

“Anya’s work in part is very formal, there is quite a bit of shapes, colors and composition, whereby one does not see personality in her portraits but rather Byzantine orthodox icons representative of her childhood. In the center of much of her portraits are women seen from the waist up; she adored her husband deeply but only produced three images of men. There was a very deep interest in feminine power, both Anya and Cameron were ‘inconvenient feminists’ during their lifetime because they were controversial with powerful, persistent images,” Since 1984 Sullivan Goss has sold nearly 150 of Anya’s paintings.

— Jeremy Tessmer Gallery Director of the Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, CA.

Complex and graceful, there is also the sense of joyful color pairings and interactions that Anya seamlessly pours into her paintings creating depth and space, shapes and figures. It is as if there is a constant attention to light seeping into her images, merging her delights as an artist into a painting. As a child of war, one would expect darker images, yet it is as if Anya chose to leave the trauma of the past behind and to live a life full or color and light. In addition to Anya being an accomplished pianist and painter she was a writer and poet. Producing a large volume of illustrated poetry books. Although she and her husband had no children of their own Anya rescued and raise her niece as her own from dire circumstances.

During her lifetime she had solo shows at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Long Beach Museum of Art. She died in 1992 leaving a large collection of paintings, drawings, ceramics and books.