The Irascibles

The Irascibles or Irascible 18 were the labels given to a group of American abstract artists who put name to an open letter, written in 1950, to the president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, rejecting the museum's exhibition American Painting Today - 1950 and boycotting the accompanying competition. The subsequent media coverage of the protest and a now iconic group photograph, that appeared in Life magazine, gave them notoriety, popularised the term Abstract Expressionist and established them as the so-called first generation of the putative movement.

The emergence of abstract art coincided with the invention of Cubism in Paris in the first decade of the 20th Century. Paris remained the centre of gravity for later art movements like Futurism, Purism, Vorticism, Cubo-Futurism, Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism until the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi persecution of "degenerate art", which precipitated a mass migration of artists and performers to the United States. New York became home to the transplanted avant-garde.

The early 1940s was of particular importance in American art as American scene painting (Regionalism) came to be seen as an inadequate mode of artistic expression in a tumultuous time. In 1942, Peggy Guggenheim, who had fled Europe with her husband, Surrealist artist Max Ernst, opened her gallery Art of This Century, showing European and promising American avant-garde artists. Jackson Pollock had his first one-man show there in 1943 and, in 1945, Guggenheim showed Mark Rothko.

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