American painter who studied at the Art Students League in New York between 1920 and 1921 and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére in Paris, in the following year. In 1923, he enrolled at the Parsons School of Design and Cooper Union Institute. He held his first one-man show in 1930 and, in 1935, he was a founder member of the Expressionist group The Ten, and exhibited his work with them until 1940. The letter he sent, with Rothko, to the New York Times laid the bases for the creation of Abstract Expressionism. From 1940 onwards, he produced Pictographs, symbolic drawings close to the magic realist style. In 1957, he reduced his pictorial language to the absolute minimum elements such as spheres and blots swaying in suspended tension. In 1959, he took part in Documenta 2, in Kassel. In 1963, he received the first prize at the Sao Paulo Biennale and, in 1974, he was a member of the New York Art Commission. His condensed pictorial language connected him to the Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko and Franz Kline.
