Schwabacher was born in New York in 1903. Her family moved to
Pelham in 1908 where she first began painting in her garden. She attended
Horace Mann School and at age 15 enrolled at the
Art Students League of New York. She also studied sculpture at the
National Academy of Design until 1921. During 1921,
Arnold Genthe took several photographs of her. After her apprenticeship in stone carving with the sculptor
Anna Hyatt Huntington, in 1927 Schwabacher abandoned sculpture and enrolled in
Max Weber's painting class at the Art Students League. That year she met
Arshile Gorky, with whom she developed a lasting friendship. She lived in Europe from 1928 to 1934. She and Gorky took independent studies together between 1934 and 1936. Gorky introduced her to
automatism. She was inspired by Gorky's biomorphic abstractions and erotic forms. In the 1930s she began to explore her own sub-conscious, combining automatism with abstract forms, referring to nature. Schwabacher often interconnected themes of womanhood, childbirth, and children. In 1934, she married the prominent entertainment lawyer
Wolf Schwabacher and had two children:
Brenda Webster, American critic and novelist; and Christopher Schwabacher a lawyer in New York. Her cousin
George Oppen, an objectivist poet who went on to win the
Pulitzer Prize, also lived in New York in the 1930s. Following the untimely death of her husband, she expressed her personal traumas through the a series of figurative paintings based on Greek myths. She died on November 25, 1984. Schwabacher's work is included in the collections of The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the
Jewish Museum, the
Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the
Rockefeller University in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in a number of galleries, including the
Anita Shapolsky Gallery, the Betty Parsons Gallery and the Green-Ross Gallery in New York City. Her work was featured in "Women of Abstract Expressionism" at the
Denver Art Museum from June–September, 2016, and at the
Palm Springs Art Museum in 2017. 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. In 2023, the
Berry Campbell Gallery in New York presented 'Woman in Nature (Paintings From the 1950s),' the artist's first solo show in New York in 30 years. == Themes ==