The Irascibles: The Birth of American Abstract Expressionism

In 1950, a group of 18 American abstract painters wrote an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, protesting a forthcoming exhibit called American Painting Today: 1950. In their view, the jurying for the exhibit had a conservative bias and would not be representative of modern art in America. The letter was published in the New York Times on May 22, 1950. That was the beginning of a series of letters and opinion pieces published by various newspapers and magazines, eventually leading to a short article in Life magazine entitled Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show which contained the iconic photograph of all but three of the signatories of the original letter.

It was the beginning of the recognition of “Abstract Expressionism” as an important part of American Art, an important point in the careers of those artists, and the beginning of a series of feuds among several of them. The Irascibles did indeed turn out to be the most well-known of the Abstract Expressionists. What were they doing around 1950 that led to the controversy and to the iconic photograph?

1. Willem de Kooning

Willem De Kooning‘s painting Excavation, done the same year that the Irascibles photograph was taken, is quite large, more than 2 x 2.5 meters (81 × 100 1/4 in.). It seems to have influences from Picasso’s Guernica, and perhaps even construction sites in New York, where de Kooning lived. Immediately after completing this painting, he began work on the Woman series, which occupied his attention for the next four years.

2. Adolph Gottlieb

In 1943, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman published a letter to the editor of the New York Times, that among other things stated that their painting style was “fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.” That is useful instruction: It helps to understand these paintings if one can suspend common sense.

3. Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhart was perhaps the only one of the Abstract Expressionists who never went through a figurative phase. His work was always abstract. In the 1940s and 1950s, he did a series of paintings in varying shades of reds or blues. He later went on to make canvases that were entirely monochromatic.

4. Hedda Sterne

The only woman in the photograph, Hedda Sterne, is standing on a table in the back row and is towering over the men in the photograph.

Sterne immigrated to the US in 1941, and soon was exhibiting at the Betty Parsons Gallery, the only female painter alongside Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. She later said about the fact that she was the only woman in the photograph that:

In fact, artists like Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, and Lee Krasner were a very big part of the Abstract Expressionists in New York and were largely unrecognized in that machismo world until much later.

Hedda Sterne also later lamented: “I am known more for that darn photo than for 80 years of work. If I had an ego, it would bother me.” She also said about the photograph: “It’s a lie. I was not an Abstract Expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible.”

5. Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still was born in North Dakota and lived in New York off and on from the 1920s to the 1950s, ultimately leaving New York and what he considered to be the corrupt New York art world. Still’s arrangements were less organized than the color field paintings by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. In Clyfford Still paintings, it appears as though colors were torn off the canvas to reveal other colors beneath.

6. Robert Motherwell

In 1948, Robert Motherwell made a small ink sketch as an illustration to a poem by Harold Rosenberg called A Bird for Every Bird. The poem and the sketch were published in the first and only edition of the magazine Possibilities, a brainchild of Motherwell, Rosenberg, John Cage, and Pierre Chareau. The poem had nothing to do with the Spanish Civil War, but it was the founding image of what would ultimately be over 150 paintings on that common theme. The first several of these were exhibited at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in New York in December 1950, a few weeks after the Irascibles photo was taken and a few weeks before it was published.

7. Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock ultimately became the most famous of the Abstract Expressionists, at least in part because the drip style of painting on large canvases was such a dramatic departure from the work of his contemporaries. In August of 1949, a bit more than a year before the Irascibles photo was taken, an article in Life magazine asked if Pollock was “the greatest living painter in the United States?” The article actually argued it both ways—that he was a genius and a fraud—but ultimately concluded that “Pollock, at the age of 37, has burst forth as the shining new phenomenon of American art.”

8. Barnett Newman

While his fellow color field painter Mark Rothko frequently put his colors into large squares and rectangles, Barnett Newman’s color field paintings often feature a vertical stripe or line, that he referred to as “zips,” which both united and separated the two parts of the paintings.

9. Mark Rothko

This painting admittedly came nearly a decade after the Irascible photograph, but is representative of the style Mark Rothko is best known for, and is one of the best-loved paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His paintings typically had two, three, or four rectangles positioned one above the other on a very large canvas. Rothko instructed them to be hung low to the ground and encouraged the observer to see them up close. The experience is quite different when the painting is viewed from near or far, but can be quite moving either way.