The American painter, Baziotes began his career in a firm specialised in stained glass for churches, which might well have had some bearing on the mysterious and translucent environments to be found in his final canvases. In 1933, he moved to New York where he studied at the National Academy of Design until 1936, becoming a teacher at Queens Museum until 1941. He showed a strong empathy with the European Surrealists exiled in New York between 1938 and 1944, especially Roberto Matta. Surrealism encouraged his sense of fantasy and introduced him to the concept of what was then called "psychic automatism". Two exhibitions held at the New York Museum of Modern Art showing work by Picasso (1939) and Miró (1941) were determining factors in Baziotes' artistic development. In the mid 40s, he became involved with Abstract Expressionism and, in 1944, held his first one-man show at the gallery most involved with that project, the Peggy Guggenheim. Between 1949 and 1952, he taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. In 1952, he was a teacher at Hunter College in New York and, in 1955-56, he took part in the exhibition "The New American Painting" organised by the New York Museum of Modern Art, which was shown in Europe in 1958-59. In the later year, he took part in "documenta" 2 in Kassel.
