Michael Goldberg

Michael Goldberg (1924-2007) was one of the significant painters of the second generation of American Abstract Expressionists, whose energetic, deeply cultivated practice unfolded over more than six decades at the heart of the New York School. Born in New York City, he studied at the Art Students League with José de Creeft before spending important years at the school of Hans Hofmann, where he absorbed the disciplined Hofmannian principles of color and structure that would remain foundational to his mature painting. He also studied briefly at the New School and served in the United States Army during the Second World War.

Goldberg was included in the landmark Ninth Street Show of 1951, the exhibition that first announced the New York School as a coherent movement. He formed close friendships with the poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and with fellow painters Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell, and he was married for a time to the painter Lynne Mapp Drexler. Working throughout the peak decades of Abstract Expressionism, Goldberg developed a robust, physically confident gestural style, and he was among the artists Mark Rothko chose as a successor to occupy his celebrated Bowery studio, an association that carried a particular symbolic weight within the community.

In the latter half of his career, Goldberg divided his time between his New York studio and a second working environment in Siena, Italy. His later paintings began to incorporate collaged elements, calligraphic marks, and references to Chinese and Italian visual traditions, deepening his engagement with the international history of picture-making. He taught for many years at the School of Visual Arts, mentoring generations of younger painters, and his work is held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, and other major American collections.