Thanks to the eruption onto the scene of a whole new generation of “American” artists – Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart – the city now had an artistic culture that was as stimulating as that of Paris in the 1920s. Through his frame-maker, Leo Robinson, Congdon met Betty Parsons, whose gallery - after Peggy Guggenheim’s “The Art of This Century gallery” closed down - had become one of the prime venues for the promotion of the New York School. Congdon began his almost-twenty-year association with the gallery with his first one-man show in May 1949, on the occasion of which he met most of the leading artists of the day, forming particularly close links with Richard Pousette-Dart and Mark Rothko.