" The abstract artist, he said, would be repeatedly challenged by such skeptics asking, “‘What does it mean?’… ‘Is it a sky, a house, a horse?’” To which they should respond with confidence and honesty, “‘No, it is a painting.’”29 "

― Mary Gabriel , Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art