Early canonAction painters [4]: Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann Color field painters: Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell. Downtown Group and the Organization of the "Ninth Street" ShowArtists who served in World War II did not have the attention of the Art critics of the post-World War II era. The studios were located in lower Manhattan in the area bounded by 8th and 12th street between First and Sixth Avenues during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The artists who occupied these studios were called the Downtown Group.[5] In 1949 the Downtown Group founded the Artists' Club located at 39 East 8th streets. The members with few exceptions were mostly war veterans, forty years old, professional artists[6] The weekly discussions in the Club led to the idea of organizing an exhibition. A linoleum cut poster was created by Franz Kline to promote the show. [7] [8] The show was located at 60 East 9th Street in the first floor and the basement of a building which was about to be demolished. Artists of the Ninth Street Show
Legacy of the "Ninth Street" Show"The artists celebrated not only the appearance of the dealers, collectors and museum people on the 9th Street, and the consequent exposure of their work but they celebrated the creation and the strength of a living community of significant dimensions.[9] [10] There are documents available from the "Ninth Street" show: Series of photographs made by Aaron Siskind, who himself was a member of the New York School.[11] [12] Yet in spite of the public interest exhibited toward the "Ninth Street" Show, there were few galleries that were willing to accept the works of the New York School artists who were unknown to the new Art criticism. A converted horse stable named The Stable Gallery, located at 924 7th Avenue and 58th Street in New York City continued to host the New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals 1953-1957.[13] The poster of the second New York Painting and Sculpture Annual at The Stable Gallery in 1953, included an introduction by Clement Greenberg:[14] [15] "This exhibition was conceived and organized by artists, the event rightly to be considered the precedent for this one was the famous "Ninth Street" show held in the spring of 1951 on the ground floor of a vacated store, on East 9th St. Like this one, that exhibition was organized, and its participants named and invited, by artists themselves, and a range of the liveliest tendencies within the mainstream of advanced painting and sculpture was presented. I don't think the reverberations of that show have died away yet..." References
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