Abstract Expressionist artist Michael Goldberg (1924-2007) is best known for his dynamic and bold creations, exemplified in this oil-on-canvas work from 1955. Possessing great scale at six by five feet, Bourgeois Still Life exemplifies the drama of daring brushwork that Goldberg and his contemporaries sought to achieve in the postwar era. A chaotic, yet purposeful, convergence of brushstrokes in white and primary hues, the painting takes artistic liberty to render the traditional subject matter of still life in a thoroughly abstract mode. At full force is Goldberg’s characteristic use of white paint to depict and “fill in” negative space between objects, speaking to how even the most hidden interstices are rendered with vitality by Goldberg.



In a 1956 review of Goldberg’s solo exhibition in Arts, this present work Bourgeois Still Life is highlighted as an example of such vitality. The review observes: “[Goldberg’s work] is an exuberance not of images but of energy: the energy of human experience. He shows what activity means: what it feels like, for example, to fill the morning with red.” 



Born in 1924 in New York City, Michael Goldberg continued to live and work in Manhattan. He began his artistic training at the Art Students League in New York at the age of 14 and attended Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Art (1941-1942) before leaving his studies to serve in the United States Army. In the early 1950s, Goldberg was immersed in New York's avant-garde circles, regularly present at the Cedar Tavern and exhibiting alongside artists like Joan Mitchell, Alfred Leslie, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, and Sam Francis. Around this time, he met the poet Frank O’Hara, who became a lifelong friend and who dedicated many poems to Goldberg. O’Hara’s well-known poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” directly takes as its main theme the difference between himself and Goldberg (the “painter”).



Goldberg’s work defies classification, having undergone numerous changes throughout his long and prolific career. He has been awarded over 100 solo exhibitions since his first show at Tibor de Nagy in New York in 1953. His works are held in numerous public collections in the United States, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Yale University Art Gallery; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.