American Abstract Artists

also: AAA

school 1937-present United States

American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded in New York in January 1937 as an exhibition society for painters and sculptors working abstractly at a time when American critics dismissed abstraction as foreign and 'un-American'. Group exhibitions - the first at the Squibb Gallery in 1937 - portfolios of original lithographs, yearbooks and pointed pamphlets (including the 1940 broadside 'How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?') built a public for non-objective art. Members worked in Cubist-inflected, biomorphic and Neoplastic idioms, but the group's centre of gravity, especially after Mondrian's arrival in New York, was geometric: by the late 1930s reviewers described its shows as 'pure' abstraction in strict geometric form. AAA helped prepare the acceptance of abstract art in the United States and is one of the few artists' organizations of its era still active.

Pereira with painting. Identification on verso (handwritten and stamped): Federal Art Project W.P.A.; Photographic Division; 235 East 42nd S
Pereira with painting. Identification on verso (handwritten and stamped): Federal Art Project W.P.A.; Photographic Division; 235 East 42nd SPublic domain (credit: Cyril Mipaas) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Non-objective imagery: invented form without reference to the visible world
  • Geometric clarity - grids, planes and primary color after Mondrian and Constructivism
  • The painting as an object in itself, free of narrative and expressionist display
  • Collective statement through print: lithograph portfolios and yearbooks
  • Tension between a strict geometric canon and broader biomorphic abstraction

Key figures

  • Josef Albers (1888-1976) — Bauhaus emigre and early member of the group
  • Esphyr Slobodkina (1908-2002) — Founding member, first secretary, later president of AAA
  • Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971) — Founding member who brought Mondrian's Neoplasticism into her work
  • Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981) — Founding member and leading American Neoplastic painter
  • Lee Krasner (1908-1984) — Early member whose path led toward the New York School

Example works

  • Untitled (Williamsburg Housing Project Murals) — Paul Kelpe (1938)
  • American Abstract Artists print portfolio — American Abstract Artists (collective) (1937)

Sources

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