Born in New York to parents of Czech extraction, Vaclav Vytlacil pioneered American abstraction in the 1930s and influenced many through his ambassadorship for modernism and through his decades teaching at the Art Students League and Black Mountain College. Studying with Hans Hoffman in Europe in the twenties, Vytlacil become an advance guard messenger of high modernism when he returned to New York in 1929. He was a co-founder of the American Abstract Artists in 1936, bringing an energetic palette and brush-stroke that would help lay the ground for the postwar New York School.