American (1924-2007)

Michael Goldberg was born and lived most of his life in New York City, making him the quintessential New York School artist. Indeed, he showed at the seminal 9th Street Show, known as the coming out of the New York School.  He is known as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but Goldberg’s work defies classification, having undergone numerous changes throughout his long and prolific career. He painted dynamic, gestural canvases; monochromatic, minimalist works; grids; calligraphic images; patterned or striped paintings, and he has experimented with collage. Beginning in 1980, accompanied by his wife, the artist Lynn Umlauf, he spent long summers in Italy. Many of his later pictures are inspired by Italy’s celebrated artistic heritage. By 2003, he had had 99 solo exhibitions since his first show at Tibor de Nagy in New York in 1953. His pictures are in numerous public collections in the United States, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

A man with a larger-than-life personality, "He embodied the existentialist romance of the New York School. You didn’t really want to be him — he was far too taxing and larger-than-life — but you certainly wanted to be around him," wrote one student of his.

Goldberg's work was recognizable for its highly-worked look, a palette that alternates between the brightly-colored and the monochromatically somber, and a palpable sense of physical pressure — both in terms of paint application and the jostling, muscular composition. In that sense--its muscularity--made it emblamatically American, of the period.

Goldberg was born in 1924 in the Bronx. His studies at the Art Students League, 1938-1942, were interrupted by World War II where he served as a paratrooper in North Africa and Burma, making eighty jumps behind Japanese lines. Returning to New York, he studied with Jose de Creeft and Hans Hofmann, and Hoffman remained a strong influence. He became involved in the avant-garde New York art scene, meeting Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Milton Resnick among others. He was also influenced by Roberto Matta and Arshile Gorky, but it was Willem de Kooning, and his use of fiery brush-work and explosive color, who would prove to be Goldberg’s greatest influence. In 1962, he acquired Mark Rothko’s studio at 222 Bowery where he worked until his death in 2007.