Jack Tworkov was born on August 15, 1900, in Biała Podlaska, Russia (now Poland). His family immigrated to the United States in 1913. Living in New York’s Lower East Side, Tworkov worked hard to learn English. He attended Columbia University to study literature and become a writer. His sister, meanwhile, became an artist and introduced Tworkov to the New York art scene. She encouraged him to visit the creative community thriving in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a town he would visit throughout his life. Also around this time, Tworkov first saw the work of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, which inspired him to leave Columbia and pursue a painting career. He studied at the National Academy of Design (1923) and then at the Art Students League (1925–26). Along with this formal training, he absorbed the dominant trends in European art and was especially influenced by Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró. Tworkov’s early work owes much to Cézanne. Applying paint in large blocks that flaunt the flatness of the picture plane, his paintings cohered into still lifes, landscapes, and narrative scenes. During the Great Depression, Tworkov’s subject matter took on social issues. He was employed in the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project easel division from 1934 to 1941. After World War II, Tworkov met Willem de Kooning, whose emotive and gestural style inspired him. He became part of the community of emerging Abstract Expressionists who in 1949 founded the Club, a group of avant-garde artists who gathered in Greenwich Village to discuss and debate art. They organized lectures, concerts, and performances and held regular roundtable discussions to rethink the relationship of art to politics and urban life. In this context Tworkov’s compositions reached their most chaotic and irregular. Yet even in these works, he applied the paint so thickly that despite their haphazard appearance, the brushstrokes produced solid blocks of color reminiscent of his earlier paintings. This predilection for more orderly compositions eventually caused Tworkov to distance himself from De Kooning and Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s. Indeed, throughout his career, he remained torn between gestural and geometric abstraction. Tworkov eventually resolved this conflict by adopting a disciplined abstraction that combined irregular brushstrokes, ruler-drawn lines, and gridded patterns. Tworkov taught at American University, Washington, D.C.; Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; University of Mississippi, Oxford; and Indiana University, Bloomington. He also served as chairman of the art department at Yale University, New Haven (1963–69). His work was shown at Société Anonyme, New York (1929), and he had solo exhibitions at numerous galleries, including the New York institutions A.C.A. Gallery (1941) and Charles Egan Gallery (1947). He was part of the influential traveling exhibition The New American Painting (1958), organized for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Guggenheim Museum’s seminal show American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists (1961). His first U.S. retrospective was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1964), and monographic exhibitions have been organized for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1957); Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1970); and Guggenheim Museum (1982). His awards included the Corcoran Gold Medal at the Biennial Exhibition of American Painting, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. (1963), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award (1970). Tworkov died on September 4, 1982, in Provincetown.