Wilson was an abstract expressionist painter whose work was exhibited frequently from the mid-thirties through the sixties. He began exhibiting shortly after graduating from City College in 1935. One of the youngest artists to show at the A.C.A. Gallery in 1940 and with the “Bombshell Group” at the Riverside Museum in 1942, Wilson was singled out by the New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell as a “discovery.” His first one-man show was in 1946 at the Gallery Neuf, and his work—expressionistically rendered Biblical parables reminiscent of Max Beckmann—was much admired by the critics for its sincerity and “vehement social protest.” Influenced by Cubism, in the forties and fifties Wilson evolved a vocabulary of interlocking shapes and bold, sweeping gestures that served as a transition between his early figurative expressionism and his later more abstract constructivist compositions.
