Born in St. Petersburg, Ilya Bolotowsky later became a leading early 20th-century painter of abstract styles in New York City. His work, a search for philosophical order through visual expression, embraced Cubism and Geometric Abstraction and was much influenced by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Bolotowsky immigrated to America in 1923 to settle in New York City, where attended the National Academy of Design. He then became associated with a group called The Ten, artists including Julian Weir and Childe Hassam who rebelled against the strictures of the Academy and held independent exhibitions. In 1936, having turned to geometric abstractions, he was one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists, a cooperative formed to promote the interests of abstract painters and to increase understanding between themselves and the public. During this period, Bolotowsky came under the influence of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and the tenets of Neoplasticism, a movement that advocated the possibility of ideal order in the visual arts. Bolotowsky adopted his mentor's use of horizontal and vertical geometric pattern and a palette restricted to primary colors and neutrals. His mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project, New York, was one of the first abstract murals done under the Federal Art Project. Despite Bolotowsky's clear, precise control of his images, he emphasized the role of intuition over formula in determining his compositions. In the 1960s, he began making three-dimensional forms, usually vertical and straight sided. Museum References: Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Ball State University Museum of Art, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Butler Museum of Art, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Institute, Chrysler Museum of Art Community Fine Arts Center, Denver Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Empire State Collection, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American art, Yale University Art gallery Flint Institute of Arts, Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, CUNY; Greenville County Museum of Art, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Kresque Art Museum, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Print Club of Albany, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA)