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Boston Globe

Elsa Honig Fine, 94, dies; historian promoted black and female artists

'No one was publishing books on women,' Margaret Barlow, who helped start the journal with Dr. Fine, said in an interview. 'Women were just seen as dabblers and as not sellable.' Advertisement The inaugural issue laid out their mission: 'recovering a lost heritage' of female artists. D. Fine, in particular, was frustrated with the cyclical nature of attention received by artists such as Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, and Leonora Carrington, who were discovered, forgotten, and then rediscovered and hailed as folk heroes. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Woman's Art Journal sought to maintain their presence in the spotlight. Its ethos aligned with that of an artwork featured in the second issue: Judy Chicago's installation 'The Dinner Party,' which took the form of a banquet table with 39 place settings, most resembling stylized vulvas, symbolizing important women in history. Carol Snyder's article described the installation as an altar that glowed 'in rich brilliance against an engulfing blackness -- a unidimensional metaphor for women's radiance and historical obscurity.' Advertisement Dr. Fine helped resurrect the work of overlooked women who defied convention, including Rosa Bonheur, a 19th-century lesbian who painted pastoral scenes, and Romaine Brooks, who dressed in men's clothes and created moody gray portraits. The magazine, which still comes out semiannually, became the longest continually published feminist art journal. Two years before its inception, Dr. Fine published one of the first general surveys of art produced by women, 'Women and Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the 20th Century.' The textbook covered the careers of nearly 100 artists, including Sofonisba Anguissola, a Renaissance painter, and Marisol Escobar, a sculptor who was famous for her collaborations with Andy Warhol but who fell into obscurity before achieving a kind of posthumous cult status. In 1973, Ms Fine published another textbook, 'The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity.' As a white woman writing about Black artists, she had her detractors. Artist Romare Bearden wrote in a review in academic journal Leonardo that the book 'confuses art history with social theories that are primarily racist to anyone who has a general knowledge of art.' To others, though, it was a welcome source of information. In a 2024 article in The New Yorker, Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in New York City, remembered it as one of the few reference books about Black artists available at the time. 'I studied every artist in those books,' Golden said. 'I sort of committed them to memory.' Elsa Betty Honig was born on May 24, 1930, in Bayonne, N.J., to Samuel M. Honig, a lawyer, and Yetta Edith (Susskind) Honig, who managed the home and worked for a submarine company during World War II. Advertisement As a teenager, Elsa took art lessons, and drawing was something she continued to do throughout her life. The summer she was 20, she studied in Provincetown with abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. The following year, she graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor of fine arts in painting and married Harold J. Fine, a psychologist. Elsa Fine went on to earn a master's degree in education from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1967 and a doctorate in education from the University of Tennessee in 1970. Her motivation was simple: She wanted to train art teachers because she believed that the art education her two daughters received in public school had stifled their creativity. In addition to her daughter Collins, an editor for digital media company Air Mail and a former correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, Dr. Fine is survived by another daughter, Erika Fine, a freelance writer and editor; a granddaughter; and a sister, Doris Honig Guenter. The doctoral dissertation that Dr. Fine wrote at the University of Tennessee would become 'The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity.' In the mid-1970s, after the textbook was published, she sued the school for discrimination when it hired a male professor over her -- although he went on to use her book to teach his class. Dr. Fine lost the suit, but the experience stayed with her. Not long after, she started Woman's Art Journal. Each issue of the magazine began with an editor's note, 'One Point Perspective,' which Fine wrote until she retired in 2006. In her last one, she observed that 'the situation for women artists has changed dramatically since we cobbled together that first issue.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in