In May 1951 the Ninth Street Show, which included 61 artists, was a major downtown Manhattan event. The Museum of Modern Art founding director Alfred Barr attended, as did the cream of what was then a tiny art world of a few galleries clustered on 57th Street. Put together by Franz Kline, Conrad Marca-Relli, Philip Pavia, and John Ferren — all active members of The Club, a key meeting ground for artists launched in 1948 at the Waldorf Cafeteria on East Eighth Street — with financial assistance from the budding dealer Leo Castelli, the exhibition marked the arrival of a new wave of artists who had absorbed the innovations of first-generation Ab-Exers like Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. This so-called second generation, which included Norman Bluhm, Nicolas Carone, Michael Goldberg, and Alfred Leslie, pushed the improvisational style further. They were represented by the best avant-garde dealers of the day, such as Samuel Kootz; Eleanor Ward, of the Stable Gallery; and John Bernard Myers, of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

By the early 1960s, however, many of these younger artists had largely been swept from the scene by the twin tsunamis of Pop art and Minimalism. "It was really a blood bath," says the critic Irving Sandler, the preeminent chronicler of the New York School, remarking on the impact of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and the like. "The market for most of the [second-generation] artists went into eclipse and collapsed." Leslie abandoned Abstract Expressionism, for a while even adopting photorealism. Others pulled up stakes to find their way outside the restrictive hub of the newly configured New York scene. Among these, Grace Hartigan moved to Baltimore, and Joan Mitchell spent most of her career in France.

Since then, these artists have gone in and out of vogue. In 1984, for instance, Paul Schimmel, then curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, organized "Action/Precision: The New Direction in New York, 1955-60," which took a serious look at Bluhm, Goldberg, Hartigan, Leslie, and Mitchell. "That show really sparked my interest," says the veteran Los Angeles dealer Manny Silverman, who specializes in Bluhm, Edward Dugmore, and Goldberg and brought works by the latter two to the adaa Art Show in February.

Lately the group has had a minirenaissance. Their works are popping up at art fairs and auction houses, looking fresh to collectors hungry for new material from the vaunted 1950s and ’60s. "What we’ve been seeing for the past five years are these less famous Ab-Ex artists’ really getting the market’s attention." says Christie’s postwar and contemporary department head Robert Manley. "The works are still so undervalued compared with those of Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning." Just consider the $70 million a Rothko brought in 2007 at Sotheby’s New York.

"Collectors are starting to look again at this generation because they are affordable," says Sandler. The works have a New York School patina and their creators were written about by the same storied critics who put Pollock and de Kooning on the map, but they can be had for considerably less than the prices those artists command. Perhaps even more important, they are available. "It’s not a question these people can’t afford a Rothko," says Silverman. "They simply can’t find one."

Helping to burnish the later Ab-Exers’ reputations are such museum exhibitions as the 2008 "Action Painting," at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and a number of gallery shows in New York. Those mounted just in the past year included Carolina Nitsch Project Rooms presentation of paintings by Roy Newell (1914-2006), several of them reworkings of his earlier compositions. A show of the works from that same decade by Carone (b. 1917) is on view through June 25 at the Washburn Gallery in New York. Carone, who participated in the Ninth Street Show, was a close friend of Pollock.

Besides being relative bargains, the paintings are incredible to look at. As the Los Angeles dealer Jack Rutberg says, "the beauty of it is that [the works] leave opportunities for us to come along and be inspired by them."

The large, hovering, soft-edged blocks of color are instantly recognizable, if not suggestive of Rothko, with whom Parker (1922-1990) was friendly, along with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still, in New York. Parker eventually turned from these "simple" paintings, as he called them, to make floating squiggles, evocative of jazz and the cutouts of Henri Matisse, whose work he admired.

Originally from South Dakota, Parker moved to New York in 1952. He first had major shows in the mid ’50s at Paul Kantor Gallery, in Los Angeles, but New York soon became his exhibition locus: He had five solo outings at the celebrated Kootz Gallery in the ’60s, then moved in the early ’70s to the Fischbach Gallery, and after falling into relative obscurity, reemerged in the late 1990s at Washburn Gallery. A 1997 show there of Parker’s small paintings sold out at $2,500 a piece, recalls Joan Washburn, who adds that the artist’s large works fetch more but remain affordable. His 1960 Untitled #397, measuring 81 by 79 inches and in pristine condition, anchored the dealer’s stand at the Armory Show last February, where it was priced at $85,000. "Go find another $85,000 painting of that integrity," she says. "It’s not possible."

When Kootz closed in the mid-1960s, Parker and some of his colleagues were left without representation. "These artists had been successful and weren’t about to go out and ask people to look at their slides," notes Washburn. Today, connoisseurs have rediscovered Parkerand his coterie. "Collectors are curious about what else was going on in the 1950s," she says.

Although often associated with Clyfford Still, his mentor at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the late 1940s, Dugmore (1915-1996) developed a fiercely original sensibility. His jagged swaths of thick paint in powerfully contrasting natural colors bring to mind the topography of California.

Originally from Connecticut, Dugmore headed West in the 1930s. He returned to New York in the early ’50s and joined the Stable Gallery, going to Howard Wise in the ’60s. It was not until 1991 that he had his next major show at a commercial venue, at Manny Silverman Gallery, which represents the artist’s estate and recently sold the huge Red and Black, 1956, to the Portland Museum of Art, in Oregon. "Dugmore sold pictures through important New York galleries, but I don’t see many returning to the market," says Silverman. The dealer has Dugmore paintings priced from $100,000 to $250,000, including Blue-Black, 1958. A similar 1957 work of the same title brought a record $116,500 — well over its high estimate of $15,000 — at Christie’s New York in 2008.

"Collectors are really looking at things they’ve missed, like Dugmore," says Michael Hackett, of Hackett Mill, in San Francisco, which is offering the artist’s 1959 Red #127. "You can buy a work like that one by him for $250,000, and it’s a masterpiece."

The Bronx-born artist began studying at the Art Students League of New York at age 14, and by the early 1940s he had matriculated and was taking classes with Hans Hofmann. A fixture at the Cedar Tavern, Goldberg (1924-2008), who was influenced by such older painters as Gorky and Willem de Kooning, had his solo debut in 1953 at Tibor de Nagy. A few years later, the auto magnate and avid art collector Walter P. Chrysler showed up at the artist’s unheated studio and bought $10,000 worth of paintings, which he paid for in four cash installments. After receiving the first payment, Goldberg rushed out to buy an electric blanket, which he slept under with the rest of the cash under his arm.

The painter eventually "had a great career with Martha Jackson," says the Los Angeles dealer Manny Silverman, referring to the gallerist who, in the 1960s, developed many artists’ careers in her town-house space on East 69th Street in Manhattan. "There are pictures of his that wound up in major collections," such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. Goldberg died at 83 in January 2008 in his Bowery studio, which he took over from Mark Rothko in 1962, thanks to an introduction from Rothko’s friend Ray Parker.

Goldberg was much admired for his gestural style, which he never abandoned. His prime works, from the late 1950s, are grandly scaled, their surfaces almost violently brushed and scraped. "I often end up with a painting that looks like it’s been to Mars and back: sort of bumpy and battered looking — which I don’t mind at all," Goldberg said in a 1958 interview. According to Silverman, such works could now fetch between $300,000 and $500,000. The artist’s auction record is $205,000, paid in November 2007 at Christie’s New York for an untitled collage from 1956 (est. $30-40,000) from the collection of the late dealer Allan Stone. The much larger 1958 oil on canvas The Keep (est. $30-40,000) brought $182,500 at Christie’s New York in November 2008. The artist’s works appear regularly in day sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where they appeal, says Silverman, to "collectors with a lot of financial resources who are looking at anything that has authenticity from the ’50s New York School."

Initially trained as an architect, the Chicago-born Bluhm (1921-1999) studied under Mies van der Rohe at the Armour Institute of Technology in the late 1930s. After serving in World War II, he resumed his architecture studies, but his interests had changed. He moved to Paris in 1947, where he took art classes and shared a studio with Sam Francis. In 1956 he moved to New York. The work he made there in the 1950s mixes the rigor of his architectural training, the formal, decorative style he encountered in France, and the freer, more gestural mode of the New York School.

In 1957 he had his first solo show, at Leo Castelli. But after seeing works by Ro-bert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns there, by the early ’60s Bluhm quit the gallery in disgust. He went on to show at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, and in Paris at the Galerie Stadler.

"Bluhm is the most important painter of the second generation. He never floundered," says the San Diego dealer Scott White. "Like Joan Mitchell, he stayed true to Abstract Expressionism."

In the Modern section of the the recent Armory Show, James Graham & Sons, of New York, offered a prime Bluhm canvas, while White brought The Idol, 1959, which had an over-ambitious $1.4 million price tag. "Everyone felt it was the best Bluhm painting they’d ever seen," says White. "I didn’t get [the asking price] and I didn’t expect to get it." In May 2008 Bluhm’s massive triptych Chicago 1920, 1959, sold at Christie’s New York for a record $1,138,600 (est. $250-350,000). The painting represented a "breakthrough" for Bluhm, as the curator Paul Schimmel wrote, in which a "European refinement" gives way to a sense of "American action, gesture, and muscle."

To some, Leslie (b. 1927) stands out as a filmmaker, to others as a figurative artist. His 1959 black-and-white movie Pull My Daisy, made with Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, is a beat classic, while his realist portraits have garnered great acclaim. But it was with his oil-on-canvas abstractions that the Bronx-born World War II veteran made a name for himself, in 1951, at age 24, in the Ninth Street Show in New York. Just a year later he had a solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. And in 1959 his large, brawny abstractions, which the late art dealer and collector Allan Stone characterized as "controlled splatter paintings," were selected by the curator Dorothy Miller for her famous "Sixteen Americans" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In the early 1960s, Leslie’s loose grids of painterly bands and geometric swaths gradually gave way to figuration as Ab-Ex lost some of its edge and shock value. Still working away in his East Village studio at 82, the artist now dismisses the 1950s pictures as "teenage works." Although one of the younger Ab-Exers, he dislikes the term second generation. "It’s a marketplace phrase, and it’s demeaning being categorized and characterized," says the painter.

Having embraced figuration, Leslie moved on to enormous grisaille portraits, many of which were slated for a show at the Whitney Museum when a fire destroyed his studio and nearly 100 works it contained in 1966. He has continued to produce realist art, but in the past few years his abstract oils have been back in the spotlight, thanks in part to the 2004 show "Alfred Leslie 1951-62: Expressing the Zeitgeist" at the Allan Stone Gallery. Nix on Nixon, 1960 (est. $200-300,000), from the Allan Stone Collection, sold at Christie’s New York in November 2007 for a record $385,000. The work contains rectangles of creamy oil overlaid with staccato splatters — an Ab-Ex device tweaked just enough to seem entirely Leslie’s own.

Known for her critical contributions to ARTnews in the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning was also an abstract painter in her own right, as ambitious if not as celebrated as her husband, the pioneering Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning. She was featured in the landmark Ninth Street Show and had her first solo exhibitions at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which launched or advanced the careers of many second-generation Ab-Ex artists. "She’s seen as an art world figure but not necessarily as an artist anymore," says the New York dealer Mark Borghi. "She’s important, but you have to sort it all out and put it back together, not unlike a broken dish."

Borghi, who represents part of the estate belonging to one of de Kooning’s heirs (the estate had been represented by Salander-O’Reilly and was redistributed after the gallery closed), explains that her uncertain artistic identity stems in part from her mixing of stylistic categories. Although abstraction was a major focus, she never abandoned representation, painting throughout her career both landscapes and portraits, including two of President John F. Kennedy, completed in connection with a 1962 commission from the Truman Library. "In the end, that kind of ruined her [as an avant-garde figure] because she was typecast as a portrait painter," says the dealer.

At the Armory Modern show in New York this past February, Borghi sold the Metropolitan Museum of Art three of de Kooning’s closely observed drawings, including a page-size 1948-50 self-portrait and two 1950 reclining nudes of her husband, for $5,500 apiece. Last June at Los Angeles Modern Auctions, her 30-by-57-inch oil Bullfight, 1961, went for $54,000 (est. $80-100,000), proving that prime-period abstractions are still available for the mid-five figures.

Borghi believes that de Kooning’s abstract works on canvas from her Black Mountain College days during the late 1940s, when the faculty included such revered names as Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell, would fetch around $80,000.

One of the longest-lived Abstract Expressionists, Sirugo (b. 1920) was relatively unknown until the 2007 group show "Pathways and Parallels: Roads to Abstract Expressionism" at Hollis Taggart Galleries, in New York. The Sicilian-born artist is still painting at age 89 and has stuck with abstraction, for the most part, covering the canvas with thickly built-up, mostly black-and-white patterns. A wide selection of his work completed a run at the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery, in New York, last month, and several of his tightly composed paintings from the late 1940s and early ’50s were shown at Hollis Taggarts booth at the Armory Show last February, ranging in price from $50,000 to $60,000.

Whether Sirugo, who studied at the Art Students League after World War II, should be classified as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist is open to debate. "I think he’s got a shot at first generation," says Jeffrey Wechsler, senior curator at Rutgers Universitys Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, citing the artist’s very "personal form of field painting" starting in 1948. The distinction is entirely a matter of chronology, notes Wechsler, who has quietly championed Sirugo’s work.

Although he showed in group exhibitions in the 1950s and ’60s at artist-run New York galleries such as the Camino and Tanager and was close with Grace Hartigan and Leslie, Sirugo is practically fresh to the commercial world. He may have been overlooked because of the relatively modest scale of his work. His 1950 C-25, for instance, is just 31 by 37 inches, and some of his pictures measure considerably less. "He ultimately preferred to work small, which is the kiss of death in the Ab-Ex world," says Wechsler. "Still, he deserves recognition for making a major body of very good work."

"A Second Look" originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2010 Table of Contents.