Tom Wesselmann was an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture. After his death there was renewed interest in his art including a lifetime retrospective, the first in North America, which opened at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in May, 2012, and travelled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He began painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. His work is widely collected world-wide. Amber Smith was an American abstract painter. He was born in 1922 in Boston, MA, and studied at the Art Students League of New York shortly after the end of World War II. He moved to Paris, France in 1954, where he befriended fellow American ex-patriate painters Sam Francis (one of the leading forces in the creation of the 'One -Cent Life' portfolio) and Joan Mitchell. Upon his return to New York in 1966, Smith mounted a solo exhibition at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio in 1967 and garnering a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971. He died in 1981 at the age of 59, and his work is held in numerous gallery collections.