"[5] In 1903 Biala was born in Biała Podlaska, a small city in the Kingdom of Poland with an important Imperial Russian garrison.

[8] Biala's parents changed their surname to Bernstein because a relative whom they listed as sponsor on their immigration documents bore that name.

At an early age she decided to become a professional artist and, during her high school years, she and her friends got together for informal sketching sessions.

[9] When she was twenty she enrolled in the National Academy of Design's art course where Charles Hawthorne was teaching a life drawing class.

[15] In the summer of 1923 she convinced her brother Jack to accompany her to the artist colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in order to study with Hawthorne and Dickinson.

In a review that appeared in The New York Times, Lloyd Goodrich noted her fine feeling for colors and commented that her work showed similarities to the fauvist paintings of André Derain.

She adopted the new name on advice from her friend and fellow Provincetown painter, William Zorach, in order to avoid confusion with her brother Jack.

shows had not produced sales of her work she accepted an invitation from her friend, Eileen Lake to accompany her on a trip to Paris.

The two of them endured dire financial straits, often raising their own vegetables in a kitchen garden attached to the villa they rented near Toulon.

[30] The poem is addressed to Haïchka, the diminutive form of her Hebrew name, Schenehaia, meaning "pretty creature.

"[31] It celebrates "all my past and all your promise" and it praises her for possessing a magnetic personality, always unpredictable, and for bringing vitality and productive energy to their relationship.

[32] Despite their continual struggle against poverty, they managed to maintain close contacts with writers and artists, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Constantin Brâncuși.

"[34] A year later, as Janice Ford Biala, she contributed paintings to a show called "1940" at Parc des Expositions, Paris.

Reporting on this show, a New York critic, Ruth Green Harris, said "The things and figures in her painting gravely turn about as if in some slow and harmonious joy.

[36][37][38] Along with Dickinson, Ford helped shape Biala's aesthetic vision by encouraging her spirit of experimentation, devotion to creative freedom, and the seeking of poetic truth in preference to literal facts.

In August the show was mounted at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, and in November she brought it to Olivet when Ford began his residency there.

[31] She and Ford were back in France the following year where Biala was given her first French solo exhibition at Galerie Zack.

In 1943 she married a fellow artist, Daniel Brustlein, an illustrator who, using the pen name "Alain," made covers for the New Yorker magazine.

[29] In successive years between 1941 and 1945, Biala was given solo exhibitions at the Bignou Gallery in New York and by that time there could be little doubt that she had succeeded in establishing herself as a professional artist.

Like Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, and others, Biala was not treated as an equal by the male artists of the New York School or by critics such as Harold Rosenberg.

As one critic put it, "she continued to paint exquisitely crafted canvases in a personal style that, even now, resists classification.

"[44] In the 1950s her work appeared frequently in solo and group exhibitions at New York's Stable Gallery and the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris.

[29] Regarding a one-person show held in 1953, a critic praised the "harmonies of tone" and quality of draftsmanship in her work and said "the show is one of the most exhilarating and satisfying events of the whole season.... Miss Biala's art strikes me as the happiest result of an abstract training governed by a humane concern with the values of the world about us.

In her interiors, cityscapes, landscapes and portraits, some colors and shapes hover and run; others asset themselves suddenly and then stay put, fixing space in a way that is reminiscent of Bonnard and Hofmann.

"[49] Following Biala's death in 2000, another critic said of her paintings that they "seem touched by a tough ingenuousness — never sentimental or naïve, but slightly nostalgic in their playful intimacy.

"[35] Finally, in connection with a retrospective exhibition in 2013, the show's curator told an interviewer that "Biala was a painter of impeccable taste and remarkable intelligence, She had an intuitive feeling for composition and her orchestration of color was, at times, breathtaking.

"[50] In 2016 her biography was included in the exhibition catalogue Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.

[51] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

[52] In 1903 Biala was born in Biała Podlaska, a small city in eastern Poland located near the border with Russia.

After marrying Brustlein, however, his success in selling drawings to the New Yorker (for which he frequently produced cover art) and her growing reputation as a painter brought in gradually increasing funds and by 1953 they were able to buy a small farmhouse in Peapack, New Jersey, for their use on their return to the United States from their residence in Paris.