Robert Moskowitz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935. When he was thirteen he was abandoned by his father, who had managed a dry-cleaning business in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His mother took periodic work as a nurse in Florida to support him and his two sisters. After high school he studied engineering drafting and got a job as a technical illustrator. He started going to museums; a friend encouraged him to enroll in graphic-design courses at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he ended up in an advanced painting class with Adolph Gottlieb and Bradley Walker Tomlin.

After graduating from Pratt, he went to spend a year painting passionate, elegant abstract canvases in an artists' colony outside...