Charles Green Shaw was on the cutting edge of abstraction in the United States. 

Hailing from a wealthy New York family, Shaw had the comfort and ability to pursue a career in art. His mother died when he was three, so Shaw grew up with his father, uncle, and grandmother, and educated himself by reading the family’s wide collection of books. This early foray into education foreshadowed the interesting life he would lead. He studied architecture for a year before enlisting to fight in World War I. After dabbling in writing and contributing articles to The New Yorker, he eventually found his calling in painting after studying with Thomas Hart Benton, famed mentor of Jackson Pollock.

Despite only having a few months of formal training, Shaw had many opportunities that helped evolve his career. In 1927, Shaw enrolled in Benton’s class at the Art Students League in New York. On a trip to Paris, he visited the studios of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Leger, and learned about the European avant-garde’s experiments with abstraction. Shaw’s 1933 series Plastic Polygon firmly asserted his status as one of the first American artists to embrace abstract art. His previous experience as a writer allowed him to write eloquently about his abstract art practice in a way not many could emulate.

Shaw was one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists. The AAA, as it was also known, was the precursor to the Abstract Expressionist movement. It was also the American answer to the abstract trends dominating the European artistic consciousness. Shaw’s abstract and non-objective works definitely hit the spot. Shaw wasn’t just a stringent abstractionist; he dabbled in Surrealism and also made montages - small three-dimensional found object works, similar to that of Joseph Cornell.

Shaw’s talents never went unnoticed, and he enjoyed a successful artistic career. He was the only American-born artist to have two solo exhibitions during his lifetime at Solomon Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the first and way less catchy name of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.