Charles Cajori

Cajori began his career during the heyday of the abstract expressionist movement. Inspired by the example of Willem de Kooning, he combined gestural abstraction with the evocation of the figure. This early drawing is characteristic of his approach in which hints of the female body appear in a field of energetic marks animating the whole surface. Cajori played an active role on the 1950s New York art scene as a member of the Tanager Gallery, an East Village artist cooperative that also included Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Philip Pearlstein among others. In the early 1960s, Cajori was a cofounder of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, which advocated drawing from life as the basis of artistic training.