Academic painter Edo Murtić attended the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb in 1935. He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1939 and graduated in the class of Ljubo Babić in 1943. Contact with the works of Leo Junek and especially Petar Dobrović, with whom he studied painting in Belgrade from 1940 to 1941, changed his attitude towards color and the representation of reality. Since 1943, he has been participating in the NOB. He created a series of mosaics, stained glass and numerous graphic maps. He is one of the founders of the "Mart" group.

In 1951, he went to the USA and Canada, where he became acquainted with the works of American artists (Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, James Brooks) and new artistic currents, especially abstract expressionism, and under the strong impression of the metropolis created a cycle of urban landscapes, Experience America (1952–53), in which reality is abstracted down to basic elements (arches, horizontal and vertical), showing the dynamic rhythm of the street and the energy of the city with a rhythmic structure of free lines and colors. In painting, he opted for his own artistic freedom, building on the coloristic tradition of Croatian painting and the current tendencies of abstract expressionism.