THE INDEPENDENT
The January 15, 1951, issue of Life magazine featured a photograph of 15 American artists. Formally dressed in their best, carefully stage-managed into a group pose, they glared into photographer Nina Leen’s lens with severe expressions well befitting the moniker the magazine gave them: “The Irascibles.” The reason for their irascibility—and the reason they were in Life at all—was that they had recently sent an open letter of protest, dated May 20, 1950, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, slamming the venerable institution for what they considered the retrograde policies behind the selections for its exhibition “American Painting Today – 1950.” The juries had largely ignored the abstractionist avant-garde that would soon be known as the New York School or Abstract Expressionism in favor of more traditional and figurative work. The scorching letter was published in the New York Times, and the artists who signed it—including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, and Ad Reinhardt—had a major media moment.
However, not quite all the artists who signed the photograph “has become? image whereby we envision the artists who achieved the triumph of American painting.” (The other missing signatories were Hans Hofmann, who as an elder statesman and respected teacher already had a cemented reputation, and Weldon Kees, a poet and jazz pianist as well as a painter who fell into an obscurity even deeper than Bultman’s.)
