The Club (1949–1957 and 1959–1970) has been called "a schoolhouse of sorts ... as well as a theater, gallery space, and a dancehall...." Created by abstract expressionist sculptor Philip Pavia, The Club grew out of the informal gatherings among dozens of painters and sculptors who all had art studios in Lower Manhattan between 8th and 12th streets and First and Sixth Avenues during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Membership included many of New York's most important mid-century artists and thinkers, predominantly painters and sculptors like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Isamu Noguchi, John Ferren, and Robert Motherwell, as well as nearly all the artists later called the New York School. But other celebrated artists, cultural figures and major 20th-century thinkers attended meetings, including philosopher Joseph Campbell, composer John Cage and political theorist Hannah Arendt. Structured to facilitate the growth and dissemination of ideas about art by artists for artists, especially abstract expressionist art, The Club lent New York's art scene the vitality and international influence Paris had long monopolized, and U.S. artists had long craved.

Called an "outspoken avant-garde thinker" by The Boston Globe, Pavia decided to organize regular gatherings of artists, writers and thinkers to socialize and discuss modern art in 1948. The result, inspired by the salons of Paris, the ethnic groups that then proliferated in Greenwich Village and a post-war desire for art that wasn't borrowed from Europe, was the 8th Street Club, known as "the Club," and its 1959–1970 successor group, also known as the "23rd Street Workshop Club." In 1958, Pavia extended the Club's work into a journal, with the short-lived but influential It is. A Magazine for Abstract Art.

Originally envisioned as a regular debate about issues in art during twice-weekly lectures, members-only panel conversations and other events, as the Club was also, in part, a response to American artists intimidated by the modernists who had taken refuge in New York after the war.

"[T]here were geniuses walking in the streets, you know. About 30 of them," Pavia told The New York Times in 2002. "They included Piet Mondrian, Max Ernst, Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Yves Tanguy, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Matisse came for a visit and everybody lined up to see him.... Eventually, [Pavia] says, the refugees moved uptown, and the Americans decided to take them on." First Pollock rejected surrealism and Jungian imagery, then de Kooning followed suit. After a series of Club lectures on expressionism and abstraction, ideas from both started to merge, and America's first major home-grown abstract art movement was on its way. Carolyn Kinder Carr, the Deputy Director of the National Gallery, explains the process this way:

Those associated with Abstract Expressionism were linked by their rejection of both social realism and geometric abstraction, two dominant strains in American art in the 1930s, and by their interest in aspects of European-based Cubism and Surrealism. For them, art was no longer about copying forms in nature but was the expression of intangible ideas and experiences. For some artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, the subject of art was autobiographical and emerged from the sheer act of making a painting. For others, among them Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, the motivation was a search for the sublime. Yet for all, as Mark Rothko eloquently postulated, "art was not about an experience, but was itself the experience."

The New Yorker's Louis Menand makes another point entirely when he writes about the sheer quantity of "formal experimentation and theoretical ferment there was in New York art between 1952 (the year by which the Abstract Expressionists had established themselves) and 1965.... You can see these downtown artists attempting solve a problem inherent in the term 'Abstract Expressionism' itself", which he points out is an "oxymoron: if something is abstract, it can't express," which explains why "there arose a push-pull between abstract forms and figuration (the same thing was happening in Europe) that yielded a rich variety of original work."

"The Club was a schoolhouse of sorts," writes Devin M. Brown, for Burnaway the online Atlanta-based arts magazine, after reviewing Pavia's Archive of Abstract and Expressionist Art at (MARBL), the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, which owns the collection, "but it was also a theater, a gallery space, and a dancehall.... [T]he collection demonstrates how various media constantly overlapped whether simply through discussion or in performance. Concerts, dances, and theatrical pieces were all hosted there. Poets, composers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and critics all rubbed elbows and argued with each other about aesthetics at the Club's many panel discussions...."

If it wasn't for our persistent gatherings, I am sure we would have all become loners and faded away.