Albert Kotin, Albert Kotin Abstract Expressionist Painting Nude Biomorphic Figure WPA Artist, c.1950’s

Modernist Composition
This appears to be an oil or gouache on paper or board.
Bears estate stamp verso.
Dimensions: Framed 25 x 21.5. Sight 13.5 x 10.5.

Albert Kotin (1907 – 1980) belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized across the Atlantic, including in Paris, France. The New York School Abstract Expressionism, and action painting represented by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others became a leading art movement of the post-World War II era.
Albert Kotin was born August 7, 1907, in Minsk, Russian Empire and emigrated to the US in 1908. He became a US citizen in 1923.
Kotin studied: (1924–1929) at the National Academy of Design, New York City; with Charles Hawthorne, Provincetown, Massachusetts; (1929–32) at the Académie Julian, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and at the Atelier de Fresque and the Académie Colarossi, Paris, France; (1947–1951) at The Art Students League of New York, New York City; under the GI Bill he went to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown and in New York City. He participated in the Federal Art Project: Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) (1933–34) and Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project (WPA FAP) (1935–40). Kotin won competitions that were funded through commissions under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (later known as The Section of Fine Arts) in Ada, Ohio, and in Arlington, New Jersey. He completed two WPA murals, The City and The Marsh for the Kearney, New Jersey, post office in 1938.
Kotin served in the U.S. Army military service during World War II (1941–1945).
After the war Kotin found a studio on 10th Street. He soon joined the “Downtown Group” which represented a group of artists who found studios in lower Manhattan in the area bounded by 8th and 12th street between First and Sixth Avenues during the late 1940s and early 1950s. These artists were called the “Downtown Group” as opposed to the “Uptown Group” established during the war at The Art of This Century Gallery. In 1949 Kotin joined the “Artists’ Club” located at 39 East 8th Street. Albert Kotin was chosen by his fellow artists to show in The seminal 1951 9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, the official title artist Franz Kline hand-lettered onto the poster he designed for the Ninth Street Show. The show was located at 60 East 9th Street on the first floor and the basement of a building which was about to be demolished. “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.” Now considered historic, the artist-led exhibition marked the formal debut of Abstract Expressionism, and the first American art movement with international influence. Replacing the School of Paris, The postwar New York avant-garde, artists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, would soon become “art stars,” commanding large sums and international attention. The Ninth Street Show marked their “stepping-out,” and that of nearly 75 other artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Michael Goldberg, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Robert De Niro Sr., John Ferren, Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith, Milton Resnick, Joop Sanders, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and many others who were then mostly unknown to an art establishment that ignored experimental art without a ready market.
Their form of art — the New York School — was later called “the quintessential American and modern art movement.”
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, dozens of painters and sculptors all had art studios in lower Manhattan between 8th and 12th streets and First and Sixth Avenues. Collectively known as the Downtown Group, many of them were former Federal Art Project artists, including Philip Pavia, Willem de Kooning, Landes Lewitin, Franz Kline and Jack Tworkov. Several had also served in the military during World War II.
There was some initial discussion of whether including women in the exhibition would diminish its chance of being taken seriously. Eventually, the jury selected eleven women, and sixty-one men.
Kotin participated in all the invitational New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals. The first annual in 1951 was called the Ninth Street Show. From 1953 to 1957 the invitational New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals were held in the Stable Gallery on West 58th Street in New York City. He was among the 24 out of a total 256 New York School artists who was included in all the Annuals. These Annuals were important because the participants were chosen by the artists themselves. Harold Rosenberg, New York art critic listed Albert Kotin among the “Tenth Street Artists: Individuals Prevail over the Group:” Kotin was exhibited by the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, McCormick Gallery, and Robert Miller Gallery-New York. Kotin was also a poet who inspired his fellow artists. Alexander Calder wrote in 1968, “As long as there are people such as Al Kotin, there is no danger to art.”