CHRONOLOGY

Left: Albert Kotin and Esteban Vicente in front of Tanager Gallery, New York, Summer 1959 Bottom: Mural for the Sociology Department of New York University, 1931. Acquired by Robert E. Rose, Virginia; then sold to Dr. C. J. Friedlender, Washington, D.C.

1907

Albert Kotin is born in Minsk, Russia.

1908

Kotin immigrates with his family to the United States at the age of one. They settle in the Lower East Side of New York City.

1924–29

During the summers, Kotin studies in Provincetown with Charles Hawthorne, the American portraitist, genre painter, and noted teacher who founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899.

1929–32

Kotin lives in Paris and studies at the Academié Julian, Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Atelier de Fresque, and Académie Colarossi.

1933–34

Kotin is employed under the first government art program, Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which lasts just seven months. Like Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, Kotin is assigned to the murals division. He is commissioned to do a mural painting for the Sociology Department of NYU in a social realist style.

1935–40

Kotin works in the Works Progress Administration (WPA)’s Federal Art Project as an easel painter.

1938

Kotin wins first prize in a competitive national mural competition for the Kearny, New Jersey post office (formerly Arlington, New Jersey post office).

1939–40

Kotin travels to Mexico as a member of the progressive artists’ group, American Artists Congress, and marries Evangelyn, a fellow artist. This trip marks the beginning of Kotin’s long involvement with Mexico, where he returns in 1968 to serve as a consultant to the Mexican government’s Olympic cultural committee.

1941–45

Kotin serves in the military for World War II as a draftsman and then as an instructor of cartography at the Engineers School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

1947–51

Under the GI Bill signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944, Kotin studies with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League. Kotin’s work from the late 1940s demonstrate Hofmann’s core

Top: Milton Resnick’s Tenth Street studio, 1956. Clockwise from far left: Irving Sandler, James Rosati, George Spaventa, Pat Passlof, Milton Resnick (standing), Earl Kerkam, Angelo Ippolito, Ludwig Sander, Elaine de Kooning, and Albert Kotin. Photograph by James Burke for LIFE magazine Bottom: Exhibition poster, 9th Street Show, New York, 1951

tenet of planar pushing and pulling, in which a depth of field is achieved without using perspectival devices but rather through overlapping planes color.

1949

Kotin joins the Eighth Street Club, known simply as “the Club,” which was founded in 1948 by artist Philip Pavia and whose membership included many of New York’s most important mid-century artists and intellectuals. Pavia lists Kotin as among its voting members, “a regular at the Waldorf and at the Club from the beginning.”

1951

Kotin exhibits in the historic Ninth Street show at the Stable Gallery, which launched the Abstract Expressionist movement. Among other artists included in the show are Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. Kotin exhibits Predators (1951) in this exhibit.

Kotin has his first solo show at Hacker Gallery, which features gestural paintings that incorporate a Pollock-like pouring technique.

Installation of Los Testigos, 1974, 166 separate pictures, various sizes, Museo Universitario, Mexico City, on view November 1974–March 1975. Photograph by Arthur Swoger

1952–61

As a result of inventing a compass that could also draw ellipses, Kotin is offered a teaching position at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He remains there for nine years but continues painting and exhibiting while teaching.

1953–57

Given the success of the first Ninth Street Show in 1951, the tradition is continued for five years at the Stable Gallery in uptown Manhattan. Kotin is one of the few artists to be invited to participate in every iteration of this Annual.

1953–58

In the mid 1950s, Kotin moves away from both poured paint and thin washes of color, opting instead for medium-to-large scale paintings with thick impasto that cover the entire canvas to create an all-over, heavily textured surface.

1958

A photograph of Kotin is printed along with that of de Kooning, Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, and others in Art News Annual for an article by Harold Rosenberg called “Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art,” profiling the New York School of painting. The first artist listed is Kotin, as “Al Kotin.”

1958–64

Kotin experiments with the size and placement of canvases, creating diptychs composed of two separately painted canvases. He also begins making miniature paintings, which are at their smallest around three by five inches. Kotin’s stylistic preferences during this time shift from heavy impasto to impressionistic, softer strokes, as seen in October, which was created in 1958 (and reworked in 1959) for a solo show at the Grand Central Moderns in 1958.

1966–75

Kotin teaches at Long Island University in Brooklyn and is made an associate professor in 1970.

1967

His wife Evangelyn dies from cancer.

1974

Kotin exhibits A Crucifixion (later changed to The Witnesses) at Museo Universitario in Mexico. Composed of 166 individual canvases depicting a variety of facial reactions and placed on the floor, A Crucifixion was installed around an implicit crucifixion, embodied by the viewer.

1980

Albert Kotin dies on February 6 from lung cancer.