Advanced and Irascible: Abstract Expressionism from the Collection of Jeanne and Carroll Berry

This exhibition showcased Jeanne and Carroll Berry’s efforts to gather one work by each of the so-called “Irascible” painters of abstract expressionism. The Irascibles earned their nickname after sending a signed, open letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to protest the lack of what they called “advanced” art in its exhibition of contemporary artists in 1950. A photograph of them that appeared in Life Magazine in 1951 became the defining image of the abstract expressionists for the remainder of the 20th century.

The exhibition featured works by, among others, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, Hedda Sterne and Ad Reinhardt. It was also the subject of a semester-long art history course at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Taught by curator of American art Sarah Kate Gillespie, the course examined ideas around abstract expressionism and how such groups and labels get formed and analyzed the shifts that happened in art making in the postwar period and the motivations behind them.