Artist

Nicholas Krushenick

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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.

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."

Works by Nicholas Krushenick

Collections represented

Catalog records compiled from museum open-access collections; the artworks shown are in the public domain. Spotted an error in this record? Tell us.