American Abstract Artists (AAA)

American Abstract Artists (AAA) is an organisation founded in New York in 1936 to promote the recognition and understanding of abstract art in the United States at a time dominated by realism, Regionalism, and socially engaged painting. The group mounted annual exhibitions, published pamphlets, arranged lectures, and even picketed museums that neglected abstraction, defending the right of non-objective art to a place in American culture. Its members included Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ad Reinhardt, Ibram Lassaw, and Balcomb Greene, and for a short time Willem de Kooning also joined the group. Aesthetically the association drew on European models—geometric abstraction, Cubism, Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism, and Constructivism—which AAA members adapted to American ground. The organisation's activity prepared the milieu from which Abstract Expressionism would later grow, and AAA itself continues to exist to this day.