High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Irascibles or Irascible 18 were the labels given to a group of American abstract artists who put name to an open letter, written in 1950, to the president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, rejecting the museum`s exhibition American Painting Today - 1950 and boycotting the accompanying competition. The subsequent media coverage of the protest and a now iconic group photograph, that appeared in Life magazine, gave them notoriety, popularised the term Abstract Expressionist and established them as the so-called first generation of the putative movement.