Artist
Nicholas Krushenick
American, 1929–1999
Nicholas Krushenick was an American Abstract Expressionism artist. 4 works are cataloged here, principally at Museum of Modern Art. Nicholas Krushenick was born in The Bronx.
Overview
Nicholas Krushenick (May 31, 1929 – February 5, 1999) was an American abstract painter, collagist and printmaker whose mature artistic style straddled Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism and Color Field. He was active in the New York art scene from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, before he began focusing his time as a professor at the University of Maryland. Initially experimenting with a more derivative Abstract Expressionist style, by the mid-1960s he had developed his own unique approach, painting increasingly decisive compositions marked by bold, colorful, geometric fields and forms simultaneously flattened and amplified by strong black outlines, in a style that eventually became known as Pop abstraction. In 1984, the biographical dictionary World Artists, 1950-1980 observed that Krushenick "has been called the only truly abstract Pop painter." Today, as other artists have been carefully folded into the same paradoxical genre, Krushenick is not only considered a singular figure within that style but also its pioneer, earning him the title "the father of Pop abstraction."
Biography
Born in New York City in 1929 into a working-class family of Ukrainian descent, Krushenick dropped out of high school, served in World War II, worked on constructing the Major Deegan Expressway, and then enrolled in art school with the help of the GI Bill, attending the Art Students League of New York (1948–1950) and the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art (1950–1951). In the early 1950s, Krushenick supported himself and his family by designing window displays for department stores and working for the Whitney and Metropolitan museums and the Museum of Modern Art. From April 21 to May 10, 1956, Krushenick showed his work to the public for the first time during The Brothers Krushenick: Paintings - Glassprints - Collages, a joint exhibition with his older brother, John Krushenick, at the Camino Gallery co-op to which the pair belonged. Nicholas's first solo show, titled Nicholas Krushenick: Recent Paintings, debuted at the same gallery on January 25, 1957. Later that year, having become frustrated with the internal politics of Camino, the brothers left and opened a framing shop in a nearby storefront, which quickly turned into the artists' cooperative Brata Gallery. Nicholas later recounted that it was John who devised the name, from the Russian "brata" meaning "brothers." Along with Camino and others, Brata became one of the now-famed 10th Street galleries, which nurtured and galvanized experimental artists by allowing them to sidestep the conservative uptown galleries that had dominated and, from a certain point of view, stifled the New York arts scene. With members including Al Held, Ronald Bladen, Ed Clark, Yayoi Kusama, and George Sugarman, Brata was "one of the most significant of the Tenth Street cooperatives which for a time were the most important launching pads for new artists." Nicholas exhibited solo shows at Brata in 1958 and 1960. After leaving Brata in 1962, Krushenick gave solo shows at New York City's Graham Gallery in 1962 and 1964 and Fischbach Gallery in 1965. In 1966 came his first solo effort in Europe, at Galerie Müller in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1967, he gave solo shows in New York City and Paris as well as in Detroit, Michigan, and Vienna, Austria, while also receiving a fine arts fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In 1968, the Center Opera Company of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, commissioned him to design the sets and costumes for a production of The Man in the Moon, held in conjunction with a large survey of his works at the center. Solo exhibitions at Harcus-Krakow Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, and Galerie Renée Ziegler in Zurich, Switzerland, soon followed. In 1969, on the heels of another solo at Pace Gallery, Krushenick was the Fall term Artist-In-Residence at Dartmouth College's Hopkins Center for the Arts, where he mentored students and created new works, culminating in an exhibition of paintings and prints at the college's Jaffe-Friede Gallery. Earlier that year, he had served as a visiting critic at Yale University, and in years past, he had accepted invitations to work as a visiting artist at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and others. Along the way, Krushenick's work appeared in seminal midcentury group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1964; at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, as well as Washington DC's Corcoran Gallery of Art, in 19
Artistic style
Krushenick was part of a generation that at first emulated and soon rebelled against Abstract Expressionism, the dominant painting movement in post-war America. This rebellion would eventually drive that style out of fashion, leading to numerous simultaneous movements that continue to interest artists, critics, historians and collectors today. Krushenick landed somewhere between them all, both embracing and rejecting elements of many styles considered distinct, including Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, and Color Field. Some of his early inspirations were Henri Matisse, J. M. W. Turner, Henri Rousseau, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg and his eventual friend Roy Lichtenstein. In 1956, when he gave his first public showing in a group exhibition, Krushenick's paintings were muddy and imprecise. Yet he was already starting to poise discernible shapes and masses next to each other in a manner that one critic seems to have misinterpreted as a "Cubist persuasion." Not a year later, on the occasion of his first solo show in 1957, another critic resisted the temptation to classify the work, content to observe Krushenick's "methodically painted strands or streamers which, varying from canvas to canvas in color, width and tensility, advance upon a rival host with similar properties or thrustingly explore an open space or solid color. The mutations on view are dramatically potent, flamboyantly so in the large canvases where black stalactites prong downward into yellow, or black fingers undulate from the bottom." In 1959, Krushenick discarded what he called the "dirty kitchen" look of oil paints and replaced it with the "delicious" electricity of Liquitex acrylics, which had just become commercially available. Having an immediate effect on the brightness and saturation of his paintings as well as the precision with which he could render them, this could be considered the pivotal moment of Krushenick's career. Following this change, his paintings start to feature clear black lines framing both the painting itself and the individual forms within it, albeit via a wobblier, curvier, messier approach than the more precise compositions to come. In 1965, one art critic, Vivien Raynor, observed that Krushenick "is now beginning to look Pop. Whether this is because he anticipated the movement and now looks more official, or because he's using acrylic colors, or simply because everyone to an extent becomes a victim of the audience's compulsion to organize artists into groups, I can't tell." Yet it is important to note that only his palette resembled Pop art. His subject matter made no references to pop culture; indeed, it made no overt reference to recognizable objects at all. However, his increasingly monumental works did find inspiration in cartoon illustration, and many critics interpreted the subject matter as more or less covertly sexual—often as vulvar and penetrative. By this time, Krushenick had begun to home in on a more exacting style, obscuring the visibility of the artist's hand. At first he did this with the aid of extensive drawings that became like maquettes for the painting. Over time, these drawings would become less precise and, instead, he'd rely on using tape directly on the canvas surface. By 1967, his style had become noticeably tighter, without losing its emotionality. As John Perreault observed in a feature story that year, "In spite of the hard black, coloring-book lines that divide one shape or super-color from another,
Collections represented
Museum