Nicholas Krushenick

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.

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).

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.

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."

Nicholas exhibited solo shows at Brata in 1958 and 1960.

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.

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.

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 1965; at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1966; and as part of the United States Pavilion at the 1967 World's Fair, a.k.a. Expo 67, held in Montreal, Canada.

Despite finding acceptance at major institutions and inclusion among the most celebrated artists of the time, Krushenick viewed himself, with some satisfaction, as an outsider.

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 1967, working with the famed Domberger serigraphy studio, the artist produced his R3-67 portfolio, a suite of a dozen screenprints that, taking advantage of serigraphy's capacity for bright color, are significantly more vibrant and yet refined compared to the Tamarind suite and track Krushenick's broader shift toward clean, consistent line execution.

The following year, published by Pace Editions and produced at Domberger, Krushenick produced his Iron Butterfly portfolio, a suite of 10 similarly vivid and composed screenprints, half of which can be viewed here.

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.

As he told the curator and art historian Paul Cummings during an interview in 1968, critics and other observers have "never really pigeonholed me... Like I'm out in left field all by myself. And that's just where I want to stay."

Between his primary pursuit of painting and tertiary collage practice, Krushenick pursued a keen interest in printmaking.

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.

In 1970 at Graphicstudio, Krushenick briefly returned to lithography, producing works embracing straight lines and angular, "more architectonic" forms.

In the mid-1970s, Krushenick began spiritually withdrawing from the New York art scene from which he'd already physically departed.

In his 1971 Fire-Flash-Five-Fade suite of six serigraphs, Krushenick compresses and sharpens his trademark black lines into jagged bolts of electricity or shark's teeth.

He then embarked, after many visiting stints at various institutions during the prior decade, on his only long-term engagement as an educator, serving as a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1977 to 1991.

Though he never stopped producing new paintings, his prominence in the New York and global art scenes faded away over time.

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."

The companion book to Graphicstudio: Contemporary Art from the Collaborative Workshop at the University of South Florida, a 1991 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, notes that "Krushenick began to experiment with screenprinting in the late 1950s and became an active printmaker by the mid-1960s," including during a 1965 fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles (which has since moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and been rebranded as the Tamarind Institute).

At Tamarind, "he completed twenty-two lithographs during his two-month tenure," which, still featuring the more organic and undulating forms that marked Krushenick's earliest mature paintings, can be viewed here.

But he still had champions, including the New York-based outsider curator Mitchell Algus and his Mitchell Algus Gallery, which held two exhibitions of Krushenick's work, in 1997 and in 1999.

The latter occurred after Krushenick died of liver cancer in New York on February 5, 1999, at age 69.

As of 2021, at least ten posthumous solo exhibitions have helped spur renewed interest in Krushenick's work and legacy.

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."

Two of those exhibitions—at Gary Snyder Gallery in New York and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, respectively—prompted major literary treatments: John Yau's Nicholas Krushenick: A Survey (2011) and Ian Berry's Nicholas Krushenick: Electric Soup (2016).

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.