Elise Asher, a painter and a poet who blended images and poetry in her work, died March 7 at her home in Greenwich Village. She was 92.
She was married to Stanley Kunitz, a former poet laureate of the United States.
Ms. Asher was an artist whose work was shown and published for more than 50 years, starting with a one-woman show in 1953 and a collection of poetry in 1955.
She has been called an abstractionist on natural themes. She rendered poetry–hers and others’, including that of Kunitz–on canvas in oil or acrylics on plexiglass. Conversely, she translated objects into verse.
Born in Chicago, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated from the Simmons School of Social Work in Boston before moving to New York in 1947.
She started writing poetry at an early age and had it published in Partisan Review and other periodicals. A collection, “The Meandering Absolute,” came out in 1955.
She was married to painter Nanno De Groot in 1949 and divorced in 1957. A year later, she married Kunitz.
Ms. Asher had her first show in 1953 at the Tanager Gallery in New York.
Since then, her work has entered private and more than a dozen public collections, including those of the National Academy of Sciences and the Corcoran Gallery. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown held a retrospective in 2000.
