Untitled

Executed on a human scale, Untitled (1957) grandly captures the artist's fervent belief in the power of movement, interactions of color on canvas and the liberation inherent in throwing off the tired yoke of oil painting in favor of a novel sensory language. Nicolas Carone (1917-2010) played an integral role in the New York school of Abstract Expressionism, where, together with friends and fellow painters Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, Carone explored the new freedoms and visual poetry of gestural abstraction at the outset of the 1950s. The group, inspired by Jungian psychology and Surrealism, freed themselves from traditional means of pictorial representation to fashion a truly American artistic style. Carone’s own paintings were further influenced by his travels to Italy after winning the Rome Prize in 1941 and on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1949 and his attendant encounteres with painters Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Burri, Conrad Marca-Relli and Roberto Matta.
Beyond being an artist of considerable renown, Carone ran Stable Gallery in the early 1950s, promoting emerging artists and exhibiting Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston and Cy Twombly. Stable Gallery’s annual Ninth Street Show developed talent and helped to launch the careers of many New York artists. Carone’s influence carried on through the second half of the 20th century, teaching at Yale University, Columbia University, Cooper Union and the Skowhegan School. Carone’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others.