INTIMATE VIEWS
Drawings and Paintings by the Irascibles from the Carroll and Jeanne Berry Collection
March 4 – May 27, 2007
Jackson Pollock: Untitled, circa 1952-1956; ink and gouache.
© 2007 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In May 1950, a group of New York artists, all pioneers in the Abstract Expressionist movement, joined together briefly to write a letter to the director and associate curator of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the letter, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and fourteen of their colleagues denounced the Metropolitan’s contempt for modern painting and declared their intention to boycott the museum’s planned juried exhibition, American Art Today.
The eighteen signatories of the protest letter came to be known as "The Irascibles."