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MICHAEL GOLDBERG
(American, born 1924)
One Year Tim, 1961
Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 60”
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson for the Martha Jackson Memorial Collection 1982.3.3

During the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, native New Yorker Michael Goldberg studied first at the Art Students League, and then with celebrated Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffmann at the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Arts. During this time, Goldberg was heavily influenced by the dynamic work of first generation Abstract Expressionists—Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko—but his dense, spontaneous brushwork is more closely aligned with the gestured abstraction of Jackson Pollock. Like Pollock, Goldberg views painting as a performance art: the artist’s movement defines both the surface and the compositional space of the canvas. His dark-toned palette and media experiments, which included mixing oil and acrylic, or adding unconventional materials to thick layers of paint, give his work a collage-like appearance. He once wrote, “the work ends up seeming composed of collage elements because specific edges exist with real weight—a surface that’s very frontal, but seems infinitely penetrable….”