Michael Goldberg was an important member of the New York, or abstract expressionist, school, a group of artists that formed in the years immediately after World War II and came to international recognition in the 1950s. These artists believed painting to be an act of personal expression and freedom.

Goldberg, who lived and worked longer than many of his contemporaries, provided a link to abstract expressionism and its values for the next generation of artists in New York, many of whom rejected or at least revised its major tenets.

Goldberg taught at New York’s School of the Visual Arts until his death in 2007. After 1980, he split his time between studios in New York and Spannocchia, Tuscany. The colors, history, and architecture of that Italian region were extremley influential on his late work. The work seen here is an example of that late work.