In which year did the Ninth Street Show, the first major Abstract Expressionist exhibition, take place? It took place in 1951.
The 9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture ran from May 21 to June 10, 1951, in a vacant building at 60 East Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, New York. It is widely regarded as the formal public debut of the New York School and a landmark in the rise of Abstract Expressionism.
The show was organized by artists rather than by an established museum or commercial gallery. Nearly 75 artists participated, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. Leo Castelli helped finance and install the exhibition, while Kline designed its hand-lettered poster.
The exhibition mattered because it presented the downtown avant-garde on its own terms at a moment when New York was displacing Paris as the center of advanced Western art. Although the show was not a conventional blockbuster, its influence on critics, dealers, and museums was substantial.