Nicolas Carone belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists. Their artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized internationally, including in London and Paris
Nicolas Carone was a pioneering Abstract Expressionist. A true mover and shaker, Carone helped shape the dynamic New York art scene of the 1950s with both his own work, as well as organizing the fledgling New York School as a curator at the influential Stable Gallery. Carone outlived most of his Abstract Expressionist colleagues, yet his style remained relatively the same as the decades progressed – complex compositions of shifting lines and layered brushwork of the action painters that enveloped the classical figural tradition he absorbed while living abroad in Italy.
Nicolas Carone was born in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1917, the oldest of seven children of Italian immigrants. When he was five, his family moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, but from a young age he commuted back to the city at night to take art classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East 10th Street. After graduating high school, Carone attended the Arts Students League and the National Academy of Design (now known as the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Art), where he studied under Leon Kroll, for whom he would later assist with a mural commission for the Worcester Memorial Auditorium in Worcester, Massachusetts.