Jack Tworkov

Jack Tworkov (Biała Podlaska, 1900 – Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1982) was an American abstract expressionist painter of Polish origin and one of the artists associated with the New York School. Born in a city then part of the Russian Empire, he moved to the United States as a child and trained in New York, where his interest in painting came later than is usual.

During the Great Depression he worked for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, where he met Willem de Kooning. Together with de Kooning and others such as Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, he helped establish the New York School. His work of the 1940s and 1950s, marked by gestural brushwork and intense color, places him among the action painters of the period.

In the mid-1960s his painting moved toward straight lines and geometric forms, as seen in Wedding Flags (1965). He also taught at several institutions and chaired the Art Department at Yale University from 1963 to 1969. His legacy lies in this double path, gestural and geometric, and in his role as a teacher of American art.