Nicholas Krushenick

1929 - 1999

American

Born in New York City in 1929 into a working-class family, 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) 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."[1] 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.