Harold Shapinsky was born in New York, and spent his life there, living with his wife in a tiny Manhattan apartment. Shapinsky was firmly rooted in New York and remained there to study at The Subject of the Artist, the school founded by Rothko and Motherwell. Despite this promising beginning, and later inclusion in a new talent exhibition at the Kootz Gallery in 1950, at Motherwell’s request, Shapinsky did not initially flourish in the blossoming American Abstract Expressionism market. Critics have tried to account for this, suggesting that either Shapinsky’s personality itself, or the parallels with De Kooning served to undermine his place within the group of painters who were gaining critical acclaim in this era.

Shapinsky’s brushwork consisted of thrusting strokes and hard lines, a style that is synonymous with Abstract Expressionism and is echoed in the paintings of Kline, Motherwell, Pollock, de Kooning and Hofmann. In this respect Shapinsky fitted in with his contemporaries, but as the movement became more established, so it became more polarised. The gestural and colour-field imagery that defined the Abstract Expressionist became associated with very large canvases, which meant the modest, paper paintings of Shapinsky were largely ignored at the time.

The similarities between de Kooning and Shapinsky have often been remarked on, and as contemporaries Shapinsky, who was not as widely known, suffered at the hands of incredulous art dealers who challenged the accuracy of his dating. Such accusations and comparisons are over simplistic, as Jeffrey Wechsler once explained:

“Shapinsky’s colour tends to be more high-keyed and based on the primaries and usually unmodulated to lighter or darker tints... De Kooning's colours are rare in Shapinsky’s palette.”

Shapinsky was also a purer abstractionist as he did not venture into figural motifs of the sort that later became a key feature of de Kooning’s work. Shapinsky himself was very aware of the overlap and, to avoid any confusion made a point of never seeing any of de Kooning’s pictures.

Shapinsky’s ‘break’ came when in December 1984 a Professor Akumal Ramachander, an English language professor from a college in Bangalore, showed Ronald Alley, then the keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate, some slides of Shapinsky’s work after a chance encounter with the artist’s son. The Professor had already tried to promote Shapinsky in New York and had met with universal rejection but Ronald Alley was more agreable and showed the slides to James Mayor of the Mayor Gallery. For Mayor the quality was evident and he agreed to hold a retrospective exhibition that opened in May 1985 on Shapinsky’s 60^th birthday. The exhibition enjoyed great popularity and all of the pictures sold due in part to a Channel Four documentary about the artist and an article in The Observer by Salman Rushdie. An exhibition in Cologne then followed.

Within Europe Shapinsky was gaining critical success and status, so it was simply a question of improving on his standing in the American art scene. An article by Lawrence Weschler, entitled ‘Shapinsky’s Karma’ published in The New Yorker helped establish a buzz and in November 1985 there was a special one-off evening view for hand-picked guests at the Kennedy Center in Washington. The Helander Gallery in Palm Beach was the first American gallery to host an one-man show and the success of this venture guaranteed the inclusion of Shapinsky’s paintings in a subsequent touring exhibition, ‘Abstract Expressionism, other dimensions’ that toured throughout America. Content with his success, Shapinsky continued to paint in his established style until his death in 2004.