Corinne Michelle West (1908-1991) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist artist, who often painted under the name Michael Corinne West.  Born in Chicago, she attended the Cincinnati Art Academy and graduated in 1930.  She had her first solo show at the Rochester Art Club in 1936, around the same time she began going by Mikael to aid in her success.  In 1940, West adopted Michael, which she used in her everyday life as well as her painting.  In the late thirties she met Arshile Gorky, an early leader of the New York school.  They became close, and West became his muse.  They were probably lovers, but it is known that Gorky asked West to marry him several times, but she refused.  While some of her early work used figuration, West turned to pure abstraction before many of her contemporaries.  Her work demonstrates a profound understanding of the nature and effect of abstraction.  West occasionally used all black in her paintings, but most of her works are explosions of color.  Her later work demonstrates the same profound exploration of line and color.  The Wiz is a powerful work, that feels somewhat primal. There is an aggression that comes to mark some of West's paintings and this piece tends toward that energy, but does not feel angry, but rather ecstatically intense.  Using only primary colors, black, and white, West adds to that sense of primal urgency to create a very effective and beautiful painting.

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French painter, writer and sculptor. He began painting at the age of 12 and was producing pointillist works at the age of 18. He studied architecture for two years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris as a preparation for his painting. In about 1943 he began painting abstract works, and he remained an abstract painter for the rest of his career. He was associated with the group of abstract artists who exhibited at the Galerie Denise René in Paris, including Hans Hartung, Nicolas de Stäel and Serge Poliakoff, and he himself exhibited there from 1945 to 1956. Together with Sonia Delaunay, Hans Arp, Antoine Pevsner and others he was a co-founder of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris in 1945. In the following year he was awarded the first Kandinsky prize.

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«Sculptor and artist. Born on May 19, 1926, in Kalisz and died on March 2nd, 1973, in Praz-Coutant, France.zapocznikow was one of the most original woman sculptors in contemporary art. Inspired by the personal experience of her long battle with a fatal illness, she created a visual language of her own to reflect the changes going on in the human body, introducing new materials to the sculptor's repertoire with which she courageously and effectively experimented to create moving works with an uncommon power of expression.During the German occupation, she spent the years 1940-1942 with her mother in the Pabianice ghetto (her father died in 1938). From there she was transferred to the Łódź ghetto, and then — via Auschwitz — to the camps of Bergen-Belsen and Teresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. After the war she decided to study sculpture.From 1945 to 1946 she trained in Otokar Velimski's studio, later moving on to study at the Academy of Art and Industry in Prague (supervised by Josef Wagner). From 1948 to 1950 she studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, working in Paul Niclausse's studio as a student. She came back to Poland in 1951 and began to participate in artistic life, taking part in competitions to create public monuments to Chopin (with Oskar Hansen), to Polish-Soviet Friendship, to the Warsaw Heroes, the victims of Auschwitz and Juliusz Słowacki. In 1963 she moved to France for good. In Paris she became involved with the Nouveau Réalisme movement (along with Arman, César and Niki de Saint-Phalle), led by the critic Pierre Restany. However, Szapocznikow retained her originality, remaining a sensitive artist focused mostly on issues of intimacy.Since for a long time she was interested mostly in her own body, one could assume that there was something narcissistic in her work. Even while radically transforming the masses of her new sculptures, she still observed biological forms. Her shapes may not have been concrete, but they remained legible enough for the viewer to realize that the sculptor was striving to find forms of expression for her fascination with the „impact force of the biology of life“, as Janusz Zagrodzki wrote. Szapocznikow herself said at the time that she was interested in „searching for form, searching for the greatest expression of sensuality or dramatic quality“. This was in keeping with her fascination with what happens to a human being in liminal moments. „The fleeting moment, the trivial moment – these are the only symbols of our earthly existence“, she wrote. This conviction was spawned by her personal experiences with war, death and illness. Szapocznikow's sculptures were almost entirely focused on memorizing the body and „recording“ the impermanent. Her designs for monuments referred more to the collective experience; later, her art would become primarily the record of one female body subject to the pressure of suffering.(Author: Małgorzata Kitowska-Łysiak, Art History Institute of the Catholic University of Lublin, February 2003. Updated by Agnieszka Le Nart, November 2011.culture.pl )

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Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski ( 28 December 1922 – 2 April 1994) was best known for his ground-breaking work in chromasonics, laser kinetics and 'sound and image' productions. He earned recognition in Australia and overseas for his pioneering work in laser sound and image technology. His work included painting (instrumental in developing geometric art in Australia), photography, film-making, theatre design, fabric design, murals, kinetic and static sculpture, stained glass, vitreous enamel murals, op-collages, computer graphics, and laser art.He was born in Golub, Poland, originating from an old noble family that was part of the Clan of Ostoja

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Jan Berdyszak (15 June 1934 –18 September 2014) was a Polish artist. From 1952 to 1958, he studied at the Sculpture Department of the State College of Fine Arts in Poznań (now Fine Arts Academy), where he eventually returned as a lecturer. He participated in numerous exhibitions both in Poland and abroad. His works were exhibited in the Foto-Medium-Art Gallery in 1980, 1986, 1995 and 2007.
In honor of his merits for culture he was appointed a Knight of Polonia Restituta Order in 1988 and an Officer of Polonia Restituta in 2001. He also received the Doctorate Honoris Causa of Fine Arts Academy in Bratislava in 1999.
Berdyszak's artistic projects cover a wide range of fields and techniques, including graphic design, sculpture, installations, photography, and stage designs for theatre performances. His art is frequently analytical and academic, and he frequently deliberates on variations of a particular problem, sometimes bringing threads from past projects into subsequent ones.A number of Berdyszak's works concentrate on the issue of space, which he defined as «the original being, and also density, darkness, void, transparency and potentiality.» He later focused on notions of sacrum, space-time continuum and infinity. His sculpture projects and stage designs frequently reflect on light, words, and movement.

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«Dan Flavin, (born April 1, 1933, Jamaica, Queens, New York, U.S.—died November 29, 1996, Riverhead, New York), American artist whose installations featuring fluorescent lighting tubes in geometric arrays emit a rich ambient monochrome or multicoloured light that subtly reshapes the interior spaces in which they are displayed, creating intense visual sensations for the viewer. He was one of the leading exponents of Minimalist art and importantly influenced the direction of international contemporary art.From an early age Flavin was interested in art, particularly drawing. But, following his father’s wishes, he attended a seminary in Brooklyn from 1947 to 1952. He was never ordained, but he clearly maintained some interest in the spiritual, as his signature explorations of light (a phenomenon in art historically associated with the divine or the numinous) reveal. In 1952 he graduated from Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception in Douglaston, New York, and he then served in the military in Korea for a year. When he returned to New York City, he studied art history at the New School and at Columbia University. As a studio artist, Flavin was generally self-taught.His earliest work of the late 1950s included paintings, text, and found objects. In the early ’60s he began to experiment with the use of fluorescent lights mounted on painted wood armatures. He became one of the first Minimalists, concerned with real space as a formal device, industrial materials, and simplified forms. Like the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin—whom he particularly admired and to whom he dedicated several of his works—Flavin often mounted his structures in corners so that the ambient light softened the rectangular space of the room. He used factory-made fluorescent lights in standard lengths and colours, thereby taking light as a found object. Flavin would use this basic format for the rest of his career, varying the number and scale of his pieces on the basis of space. From 1983 to 1988 he renovated a former firehouse and church in Bridgehampton, New York, as a permanent site for his work. The building, known as the Dan Flavin Art Institute, is now maintained by the Dia Art Foundation.»

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Yvonne Thomas (1913 Nice – August 7, 2009 Aspen, Colorado) was an American abstract artist.
«Yvonne Thomas was born in Nice, France and moved to the United States in 1925. She graduated from Cooper Union is 1928 and joined the Art Students League in 1940.Thomas was nearly forty years old and an accomplished painter when the 9th Street Show opened in 1951.  She had already abandoned a promising career as a commercial artist and fashion illustrator in the thirties to pursue painting.
Her earliest training in New York was under Alphaeus P. Cole at Cooper Union.  In 1948 she met Patricia Matta, wife of the famous Surrealist, who introduced her to a group of abstract painters forming a school called Subjects of the Artist. She enrolled and found a new home.Thomas lived in New York City.Yvonne Thomas’ art acknowledges the union of paint and support that the famous critic Clement Greenberg posed as a modernist quest for a responsible colorist. The poetry and sophistication of the paintings is the culmination of an education received firsthand from several leaders of the New York School’s first generation. Besides her education at Cooper Union and the Art Students League and a period of study at the famous Ozenfant School of Art in France, she was one of five privileged students to be part of the now famous Subject of the Artists School that was conducted by Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Baziotes and Hare in 1948. She subsequently worked a year with Robert Motherwell. These artists did not encourage their student to emulate modern masters. Instead they instilled the formal advances of such figures as Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian. The artists learned how to deal with problems such as how to use color as a way to structure a painting. Through working with Motherwell, Thomas inherited a thorough grounding in improvisational principles of psychic automatism from the surrealists. She was further influenced by Hans Hoffman’s principles at his Manhattan school. From this school she appreciated the emotive potentialities of color and the need to work contrapuntal in terms of positive and negative spaces. She developed an appreciation for the significance of taking the overall dimensions of a given canvas into consideration as a key compositional element. Despite, and on account of this education, Thomas has always held to her own interpretation of these principles.These works of Yvonne Thomas are painted with supple palettes and are described well in a 1960 review of Thomas’ works at the Stuttman Gallery in Manhattan by Donald Judd, „…Wide brush strokes and sweeps of color glissade to plane of the bare canvas. The paint and canvas are identified with one another continued into each other, and the consequent speed and thinness of the surface engender the clarity and singleness of the poetry.“

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Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) was an American painter. His geometrically oriented abstract paintings were influenced by Piet Mondrian and his style has been associated with the Hard-edge school, of which he is considered one of the founders.
Smith was born near Chickasha, Oklahoma a year before it became a state. He grew up among American Indians of the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes. He graduated from East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma in 1934. He moved to New York City in 1936, where he attended Columbia University, and remained in New York for the rest of his life.Much of Smith's work was inspired by the interchange between positive and negative space and using as few elements as possible to create a convincing space, object, or motion. He frequently used canvases which were round or other non-standard shapes and painted with close valued colors

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Richard Irving Bowman (1918–2001) was an abstract painter who worked primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. He painted in an idiosyncratic style inspired by transcendental visions of nature, exposure to surrealism and investigations into sub-atomic physics. He is considered one of the first fine artists to employ fluorescent paint, which he maintained embodied sub-atomic life energy, beginning in the early 1950s.owman was born in Rockford, Illinois in 1918. He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago School in 1942, and received a master's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in 1949. During the 1940s he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago. One of his students was the abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, with whom he exhibited and was romantically linked. In 1950 he was invited to teach in the newly formed art department at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. In 1954 he came to San Francisco at the invitation of Gordon Onslow Ford. From 1949- 1963 he taught intermittently at Stanford University in Stanford, CA. Bowman's reputation and success rose during the period from 1959-1977, when he exhibited continuously at the Rose Rabow Gallery

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«Taro Yamamoto’s prolific career began at a young age. By the age of ten, he was already painting landscapes and still lifes in oil, and had won numerous prizes in exhibitions at school.Yamamoto was born in Hollywood, California in 1919, but was taken to live and study in Japan when he was six. His parents wanted him to receive a traditional Japanese education as he was descended from a long line of Shinto priests. Yamamoto remained there until he was 19 years old, then returned to the United States and studied cubism at Los Angeles City College.From 1941-1946, Yamamoto served in the U.S. Army. He then went back to painting, studying at Santa Monica City College where he made an award winning painting that was later presented to the Methodist Church in West L.A.Like many of his significant peers from that time, Yamamoto studied at the Art Students’ League in New York, working under Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Morris Kantor, Vaclav Vytlacil and Byron Browne. He subsequently received a scholarship from the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, and began studying there in 1952. That same year, Yamamoto received the John Sloan Memorial Fellowship. The following year he won the Edward G. McDowell Traveling Fellowship and spent a year painting and studying in Europe. Yamamoto also spent periods of time at the McDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 1954, 1956 and 1957.He lived out his days in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with his wife and his son.»

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