Born in Russia, his family moved to Baku and Istanbul, and then settled in New York in 1923. It was in this city that he studied at the National Academy of Design. He is part of the group of artists "The Ten", besides Louis Schanker, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Joseph Solman. With them, he rebelled againts the strict rules of the academy and participated in independent exhibitions. His pieces are geometrically abstract. The objective of his artistic research is a philosophical order through visual expression. He gets inspired by Piet Mondrian, from whom he adopted his horizontal and vertical lines and his restricted palette of colors. He also paints murals in Brooklyn. His first solo exhibitions in a museum took place at the prestigious Guggenheim Museum of New York in 1974. Today, his pieces are part of numerous museum collections all around the world, in France, India, Sweden, London just to name a few.