Born in 1927, Ernest Trova achieved his first small success at the age of twenty when the visiting Max Beckmann selected his painting Roman Boy as the winner of the local museum’s annual exhibition. When the president of the St. Louis Artists’ Guild publicly declared Trova’s work fit only to “hang in an outhouse,” the row resulted in the self-taught artist and his partially dripped painting being pictured on a full page of LIFE Magazine, almost two years before Jackson Pollock’s star-making turn on the same pages. In the following years Trova continued his ad hoc art education, personally seeking out Willem de Kooning and poet Ezra Pound, whose dual influences would heavily impact the young artist’s developing practice and philosophy. Trova continued primarily as a painter for the first 14 years of his career, and as early as 1958 could be said to have identified what would become the central impulse of his mature work– the serial use of invented abbreviations of the human figure, which developed until he arrived at the wholly elegant collection of human curves that would become his breakthrough construct, Falling Man.