George J. McNeil was born in Queens, New York, on February 22, 1908, the youngest child of an Irish Catholic working-class family.

His early 1950s paintings were "both abstract and expressionist"[2] with an active surface " very moving, full of feeling, emotional"[3] displaying the "painterly touch"[4] that was identified with the artists exhibiting at the Charles Egan Gallery.

[5]From 1980, dynamic situations such as discos, New York City, football, street life or graffiti activate his paintings.

[6] From 1970 to 1991 McNeil made lithographs that he printed on his own press or at the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, where he was invited four times in the 1980s.

At the New York World's Fair in 1939 he was one of five abstract artists who exhibited; Stuart Davis appointed him an alternate juror for the Committee of Selection.

Early in 1936 a small group of 9 abstract artists met at Ibram Lassaw's studio at 232 Wooster Street, New York: Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Byron Browne, Gertrude Greene, Balcomb Greene, Harry Holtzman, George McNeil, Albert Swiden, Ibram Lassaw and Burgoyne Diller.

From the late 1950s, together with Charles Cajori, Mercedes Matter and Sidney Geist, he took part in the life drawing sessions which gave rise to the New York Studio School.

"[14] His highly successful exhibits at the Gruenebaum Gallery, 1981–87, brought his work together with that of many of his fellow gestural abstractionists and friends such as Janice Biala, James Brooks, Giorgio Cavallon, Elaine de Kooning, Sonia Gechtoff and Grace Hartigan.

His teaching influenced generations of young artists including Robert Wilson, Thomas Nozkowski and Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship.