The Irascibles

The subsequent media coverage of the protest and a now iconic group photograph that appeared in Life magazine gave them notoriety, popularized the term Abstract Expressionist and established them as the so-called first generation of the putative movement.

Paris remained the centre of gravity for later art movements like Futurism, Purism, Vorticism, Cubo-Futurism, Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism until the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi persecution of "degenerate art", which precipitated a mass migration of artists and performers to the United States, further advanced by the 1940 Nazi occupation of France.

The Betty Parsons Gallery, which opened the previous year, began representing Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.

At the Kootz Gallery, from 1946 to 1948, Hans Hofmann, William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell were offered at between $100 and $950, likely fetching much lower actual sales prices.

[5] In 1948, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, David Hare, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko founded the Subjects of the Artist School at 35 East 8th Street.

[15]: 303  At the end of the closed session it was suggested by Adolph Gottlieb that the assembled artists protest the conservative bias of the jury for the upcoming competition at the Metropolitan.

[16]: 48 Gottlieb spent the better part of three weeks drafting an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan, conferring with Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman while soliciting consensus among other artists by mail or phone.

Pollock sent a telegram instead:[17]: 602 I ENDORSED THE LETTER OPPOSING THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART 1950 JURIED SHOW STOP JACKSON POLLOCKThe letter was underwritten by Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodoros Stamos, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Hedda Sterne, James Brooks, Weldon Kees and Fritz Bultman.

The New York jurors were Charles Burchfield, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Leon Kroll, Ogden Pleissner, Vaclav Vytlacil and Paul Sample.

The national jury consisted of Robert Beverly Hale, Ogden Pleissner, Maurice Sterne, Millard Sheets, Howard Cook, Lamar Dodd, Francis Chapin, Zoltan Sepeshy and Esther Williams.

Weldon Kees discussed the issue of the open letter further in the June 5 edition of The Nation, calling director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Henry Taylor a philistine.

[23]: 133  Two days later Time magazine noted the protest in an article entitled The Revolt of the Pelicans,[24] an oblique reference to Taylor's 1948 comments in the Atlantic Monthly.

Instead of soaring like an eagle through the heavens as did his ancestors ... the contemporary artist has been reduced to the status of a flat-chested pelican, strutting upon the intellectual wastelands and beaches, content to take whatever nourishment he can from his own too meager breast.Alfred Barr, seeking to distinguish the MoMA, further electrified the situation by selecting Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock for the American pavilion of the 25th Venice Biennale, held from June to October 1950.

Signers included Milton Avery, Will Barnet, Philip Evergood, Xavier Gonzalez, George Grosz, Henry Koerner, Reginald Marsh, Waldo Peirce, Manfred Schwartz and Harry Sternberg.

[26] Life magazine decided to publish a photo story for their January 15, 1951 edition, which would document the results of the competition and feature a photograph of the protesters.

Nor was I an Irascible.”[29] Painter Lee Krasner believed Sterne was allowed at the insistence of art dealer Betty Parsons, who represented many in the group.

[4] I think they loved having their pictures taken, but they seemed to be afraid to be nice - they didn't want to appear too commercial.The subsequent Life article did more than provide the public with an image of the group, looking more "like bankers" than irascible.

[4] The picture caption also referred to the protest as in keeping with avant-garde tradition, mentioning the Salon des Refusés of 1863 and the Ashcan School.

[27] Irving Sandler, a historian of the New York School and Abstract Expressionism wrote that the Leen photograph "has become the image whereby we envision the artists who achieved the triumph of American painting".

At the end of the three-day symposium at Studio 35 in 1950, Alfred Barr challenged the group to name themselves, to which de Kooning responded: "it is disastrous to name ourselves".

[33]: 42 Despite their subsequent labels as Abstract Expressionist, action painters and so forth, this is a picture of a group that never was a group, a picture of fifteen individuals, unified only by the click of a camera at a particular time and place.Already in 1951, relationships had deteriorated enough for Pollock, Newman, Still and Rothko to approach Betty Parsons with the idea of showing them exclusively, effectively leaving their erstwhile colleagues to fend for themselves.

Irving Sandler used it as the frontispiece and rear dust jacket photograph of his The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, published in 1970.