Max Spivak (1906 in Bregnun, Poland - 1981 in New York City) was an American visual artist known primarily as a ceramic muralist.
Initially Spivak pursued a career as an accountant, then he travelled to Paris where he met the painter Arshile Gorky who was a big influence on him.
Spivak was among the many artists who created murals for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the American Great Depression. [1] During this time, one of his assistants was the future abstract expressionist icon Lee Krasner. [2]
Spivak is especially noted for his mosaic mural in the vestibule entryway of 111 West 40th street in midtown Manhattan (today re-addressed as 5 Bryant Park), a work which through abstract forms pays tribute to some of the tools of the garment industry which once flourished in the location's Lower Manhattan district. [3] [4] [5]
Spivak's work was included in two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New Horizons in American Art in 1935 and Painting and Sculpture in Architecture in 1949. [6]
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash. The museum, America's first devoted exclusively to modern art, was led by A. Conger Goodyear as president and Abby Rockefeller as treasurer, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director. Under Barr's leadership, the museum's collection rapidly expanded, beginning with an inaugural exhibition of works by European modernists. Despite financial challenges, including opposition from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the museum moved to several temporary locations in its early years, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually donated the land for its permanent site.
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator who is considered one of the most influential 20th-century art teachers in the United States. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, into a Roman Catholic family with a background in craftsmanship, Albers received practical training in diverse skills like engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring during his childhood. He later worked as a schoolteacher from 1908 to 1913 and received his first public commission in 1918 and moved to Munich in 1919. In 1920, Albers joined the Weimar Bauhaus as a student and later became a faculty member in 1922, teaching the principles of handicrafts. With the Bauhaus's move to Dessau in 1925, he was promoted to professor and married Anni Albers, a student at the institution and a textile artist. Albers' work in Dessau included designing furniture and working with glass, collaborating with established artists like Paul Klee.
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and visual artist active primarily in New York. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, transitioning to war propaganda artworks during the War Services era.
The National Museum of the American Indian–New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, is a branch of the National Museum of the American Indian at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in Manhattan, New York City. The museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution. The center features contemporary and historical exhibits of art and artifacts by and about Native Americans.
Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bontecou made abstract sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s and created vacuum-formed plastic fish, plants, and flower forms in the 1970s. Rich, organic shapes and powerful energy appear in her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.
Elizabeth Woodman was an American ceramic artist.
Elizabeth Murray was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Murray was known for her use of shaped canvases.
Irving Kriesberg was an American painter, sculptor, educator, author, and filmmaker, whose work combined elements of Abstract Expressionism with representational human, animal, and humanoid forms. Because Kriesberg blended formalist elements with figurative forms he is often considered to be a Figurative Expressionist.
Charles Seliger was an American abstract expressionist painter. He was born in Manhattan June 3, 1926, and he died on 1 October 2009, in Westchester County, New York. Seliger was one of the original generation of abstract expressionist painters connected with the New York School.
Grace Hartigan was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and a significant member of the vibrant New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle of friends, who frequently inspired one another in their artistic endeavors, included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Frank O'Hara. Her paintings are held by numerous major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As director of the Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting, she influenced numerous young artists.
Philip Pavia (1911-2005) was a culturally influential American artist of Italian descent, known for his scatter sculpture and figurative abstractions, and the debate he fostered among many of the 20th century's most important art thinkers. A founder of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, he "did much to shift the epicenter of Modernism from Paris to New York," both as founding organizer of The Club and as founder, editor and publisher of the short-lived but influential art journal It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art. Reference to the magazine appears in the archives of more than two dozen celebrated art figures, including Picasso, Peggy Guggenheim, and art critic Clement Greenberg. The Club is credited with inspiring art critic Harold Rosenberg’s influential essay “The American Action Painters" and the historic 9th Street Show.
John Millard Ferren was an American artist and educator. He was active from 1920 until 1970 in San Francisco, Paris and New York City.
Jeanne Patterson Miles (1908–1990) was an American abstract painter and sculptor.
Carmen Louis Cicero is an American painter from Newark, New Jersey.
Moses Ros–Suárez is a Dominican–American architect, sculptor, painter, printmaker and muralist who lives and works in New York City.
David Ross Novros, is an American artist. He is known for his minimalist geometric paintings, shaped canvases, and his use of color. He has also studied fresco painting extensively.
Lee Hall was an American painter, writer, educator, and a university president. She was an abstract landscape painter. She served as the 13th president of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 1993, Hall wrote a controversial book on the artists Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning.
Francis Valentine O’Connor was an American art historian who was pioneering scholar of the visual art of the New Deal and an expert on the contemporary artist Jackson Pollock.
Cristos Gianakos is an American postminimalist artist known for his large-scale ramp sculptures and installations. He lives and works in New York, where he has been teaching at the School of Visual Arts since 1963.
2 Broadway murals are a pair of untitled decorative mosaic murals by the American artist Lee Krasner completed in 1959 and located at 2 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, New York. Both murals are abstract with colorful planes made from glass tesserae in green, gold, black, and crimson, echoing the dynamism of Krasner's Abstract Expressionist painting style. The larger mural, installed above the Broadway entrance, is 86 feet by 12 feet, while the smaller one is 15 feet by 15 feet and placed above the entrance facing Broad Street. They were commissioned in 1958 by the New York-based real estate company Uris Brothers, which was headquartered at and owned the office building at 2 Broadway. Krasner designed and completed the murals in collaboration with her nephew, Roland Stein.