Nicolas Carone, one of the last surviving abstract expressionist painters, died July 15 at his home in Hudson, N.Y. He was 93. His death was confirmed by the Washburn Gallery in Manhattan. At his death the gallery had been exhibiting his canvases from the 1950s; the work is on view through Friday. Carone was present at the beginning of the New York School and friends with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Lee Krasner. But his best work may have come long after the style faded, in the large paintings in shades of black, white and gray that he made during the last two or three decades of his life. The shifting lines and layered brushwork of these works most completely integrated the classical figurative tradition he absorbed during his earliest art studies and the instinctive painting processes of abstract expressionism. Carone was born in June 4, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the eldest of seven children of Italian immigrants. He grew up in Hoboken, N.J., where his father was a bartender, and began drawing at age 4. When he was around 11, his mother sent him to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in Manhattan, which offered instruction for a small tuition. After high school, he studied art at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League and finally at Hans Hoffmann's school. Between 1947 and 1951 he lived in Italy, partly on a Fulbright fellowship. Carone had his first solo exhibition in Rome in 1949 and his first New York show at the Stable Gallery in 1954. During the next decade he showed at Stable and then at the Staempfli Gallery in New York; participated in numerous museum surveys of contemporary paintings (including two Whitney Museum annuals); and exhibited in the Venice Biennale. His works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim. But in the early 1960s his career was eclipsed by pop art and minimalism. He effectively withdrew from the New York gallery world for 40 years but continued working in several mediums and styles. In 1964 he joined the founding faculty of the New York Studio School, where he taught drawing for nearly 25 years. He also taught at Columbia University, Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. In the 1970s he bought a house in Doglio, a town in Umbrian region of Italy, and in 1988 he founded an art school there, which he ran for 10 years. He also had a home in Manhattan. In 2005 Ro Lohin, a former student of Carone's, persuaded him to have a show of drawings at the Lohin Geduld Gallery, which she and a partner had just opened in Chelsea. It was his first solo show in a New York gallery since 1962. Two years later the gallery exhibited his sculptures, carved from fieldstones he found on his property in Italy. In 2008 and 2009 he showed recent abstractions with Washburn. For several decades Carone also painted what Lohin described as 'imaginary portraits' -- portraits of people who did not exist -- which have rarely been exhibited. Carone was married and divorced twice. He is survived by his sons, David Hart of Fort Wayne, Ind., from his marriage to Nell Mager, and by Claude Carone of Claverack, N.Y., and Christian Carone of Brooklyn, from his marriage to Adele Bishop; and a grandson. 