AT A party in Manhattan on New Year’s Eve 1949, a man was heard to exclaim to his fellow artists in the room that the first half of the century had belonged to Paris, but the second would be claimed by New York. The author of that declaration of independence — part rallying cry, part prophecy fulfilled — was Philip Pavia, whom history is likely to remember as much for his organisational role within the Abstract Expressionist movement as for the sculptures he contributed to it.

Pavia spent much of the mid-1930s in Paris, and on returning to the US nurtured the idea of recreating those laboratories for the arts that were the lively cafés of the Left Bank. In 1948 he and a handful of artists, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Milton Resnick, founded The Club on 8th Street, at the heart of the Lower Manhattan district where dozens of painters then had their studios.

Its premises provided somewhere for them to meet, and Pavia took the initiative in chairing the debates about the direction that US art should take. He believed that it was desirable to synthesise the two dominant strands in painting — Abstraction and Expressionism — and it was the often heated discussions he provoked that helped to give the group its focus and profile.

In 1957 Pavia resigned from The Club to start a journal, It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art, which during its short life of six issues acted as a lightning rod for criticism of the new movement. For Pavia, this was a badge of honour; he enjoyed feuds and saw the making of enemies as proof of the vitality of his ideas.

The magazine featured writing by John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Barnett Newman. Recently, Pavia had sold his archive from the period — which will be an important source for future histories of “action painting” — to Emory University.

Of Italian and French descent, Philip Pavia was born in Connecticut in 1911. His father, a stone cutter and carver, insisted that he completed his studies in Florence after his time at Yale and at the Art Students League, New York, where he made friends with Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. The latter introduced him to Picasso’s work, prompting Pavia to travel to Paris, where he met another lifelong influence, Henry Miller.

Miller’s criticisms of the old wave of American expatriate authors, and his fierce espousal of an avant-garde approach to life, led to Pavia’s conviction that his art should be an outward reflection of his inner self, in essence the credo of the Abstract Expressionists. He had no truck with Surrealism, believing it unsuited to the American character.

Pavia took part in the 9th Street shows of the early 1950s which forged the reputations of Pollock and de Kooning, and indeed transferred the balance of artistic power from Paris to New York, but his own work stood at a tangent to those of his fellow revolutionaries. Although in the 1930s he had made drawings and watercolours, after the war he worked mainly as a sculptor. One of the few in the movement, he straddled the fence, sculpting both abstract and figurative pieces.

He showed at the Wildenstein Gallery in 1946, but though he liked a party Pavia was something of a loner in his work, and arguably more of an original than some of his better-known contemporaries. Accordingly, he became well established only in the 1960s, after exhibiting at the Kootz Gallery.

His first large commission came from the Hilton Hotel, New York, in 1962. Ides of March — a reference to his birthday — consisted of four large, rough-hewn diamond shapes whose edges appeared to follow the viewer wherever he walked. At more than 3m (10ft) high, it was then the largest Abstract bronze ever cast, and was a success with the city’s passers-by. Pavia considered it his masterpiece, and was upset when, in March this year, three of the four pieces, weighing some 800kg (1,800lbs), turned up in the yard of a Bronx scrapdealer.

In the 1960s Pavia worked in marble as well as metal, creating tumbling blocks of coloured stone that echoed the effects de Kooning had achieved in his paintings, and which are perhaps underrated for their originality. He made other works on a monumental scale for The Cloisters, New York, and for Battersea Park in London, while his Sunrise was displayed outside the Guggenheim Museum for a year. In 1973 he showed a 2m-tall bronze head of President Kennedy at the Metropolitan Museum.

Later shows included one at Max Protetch’s gallery in 1982, which consisted of imaginary portraits of many members of The Club. In 1999 he was selected as one of the Artists of the Millennium for an exhibition at the United Nations building in New York, and this year, aged 94, had his final show at the OK Harris Gallery, where his studies of 12 terracotta heads, executed in a menacingly primitive style, drew comparisons with the work of Giacometti. His work can be seen in the collections of the Whitney and Metropolitan Museums.

Philip Pavia is survived by his wife, Natalie Edgar, a painter, and by two sons.

Philip Pavia, sculptor, was born on March 15, 1911. He died on April 13, 2005, aged 94.