Michael Goldberg (painter)

[1] In the 1950s he studied painting with Hans Hofmann, and he discussed painting with Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and several others of the New York School[4] sometimes at The Eighth Street Club,[5] a regular meeting place of modern artists working in and around Tenth Street in New York[4][6] and sometimes at the Cedar Bar.

[7] He began to exhibit his paintings in New York City during the early 1950s, and some of his abstract expressionist peers included artists like Joan Mitchell, Alfred Leslie, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Knox Martin, Friedel Dzubas, Norman Bluhm, and Sam Francis among others.

With the changing of fashions in the art world; his greatest accomplishments as a painter weren't sufficiently recognized; and as many of his generation his work was overlooked for many years.

He was known in early 1950's for an affair with the poet and playwright Violet Ranny Lang and is celebrated in her play "Fire Exit," as told in Alison Lurie's memoir V.R.

Although by the 1970s and 1980s his work began to achieve recognition and appreciation and he enjoyed a long, successful and a celebrated career as an abstract painter.