Nicholas Krushenick

Nicholas Krushenick was born on May 31, 1929, in the Bronx, New York. He left high school to join the Army at seventeen, completed his diploma while in service, and used his GI Bill benefits to study at the Art Students League of New York from 1948 to 1950 and then with Hans Hofmann at his School of Fine Arts from 1950 to 1951. He did not complete a college degree.

From about 1957 to 1962, Krushenick co-ran the Brata Gallery, an artist-run cooperative space in Manhattan's East Village, with his brother. His own painting developed through the late 1950s and 1960s into a signature style of thick black outlines enclosing flat, saturated color fields and biomorphic forms, work that placed him at the crossroads of Pop art, hard-edge abstraction, and Op art. He showed at the Graham Gallery in New York beginning in 1958, and by the mid to late 1960s his work appeared in major museum surveys, including Post Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Vormen van de Kleur at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, both in 1964, and Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1965. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, though the exact year is not documented in available sources, and was represented in Documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968, the same year the Walker Art Center mounted his first retrospective. A European retrospective followed at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover in 1972.

Krushenick taught as a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, from roughly 1977 to 1991. He continued to paint and exhibit into the 1990s, including two shows at Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York in 1997 and 1999. He died on February 5, 1999, at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, of liver cancer, at age 69. He lived in Manhattan at the time of his death.

Krushenick's reputation rests on his fusion of Pop imagery with abstract painting's scale and seriousness. The critic Robert Rosenblum described elements of his work as resembling details from cartoons, comparing passages to Superman's hair follicles, a description repeated in gallery texts on the artist. Writing in Artforum in 1999 on the occasion of Krushenick's death, the painter and critic Peter Halley credited his work with presaging both Japanese animation and the posthuman abstraction being pursued by younger artists at the time. His work has been the subject of museum surveys into the 2010s, including Nicholas Krushenick: Electric Soup at the Tang Teaching Museum in 2015, which reintroduced his particular strand of Pop abstraction to a new generation of critics and curators.

The most reliably documented auction result for Krushenick is United Color Kit, which sold for USD 102,000 at Shannon's Fine Art Auctioneers in Milford, Connecticut, reported at the time as a record price for the artist; the exact calendar date of the sale is not stated in the available reporting. Beyond that high point, his auction footprint is thin: a painting titled Skyscape sold at Phillips for USD 24,130, illustrating a wide gap between his top result and more typical prices; the exact sale date for that result is likewise not documented in available sources. This pattern, a small number of paintings commanding strong prices against a much larger base of modestly priced prints and works on paper, is consistent with an artist whose museum reputation exceeds the depth of his auction record.

Krushenick's estate is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, its primary gallery and the primary channel for both new market activity and questions of provenance, since no catalogue raisonne has been confirmed. His auction history is sparse and uneven, with a single documented result of USD 102,000 for the painting United Color Kit standing well above the modest prices typically seen for his prints and works on paper. Collectors should treat any single sale as a data point rather than a trend line, and should expect that his deep institutional holdings, in museums including MoMA, the Whitney, and the Stedelijk, are a stronger signal of long-term standing than the current, thin auction record.