The American artist with any pretensions to total seriousness suffers still from his dependency upon what the School of Paris, Klee, Kandinsky, and Mondrian accumulated before 1935… . All excellence seems to flow still from that vivacious, unbelievable near past which lasted from 1905 until 1930 and which not even the First World War, but only Hitler, could definitely terminate.
—Clement Greenberg, 1947

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss.
—Robert Motherwell, 1951

We Americans have the technique to bring something to performance so well that the subject is left out. There is nothing we throw away so quickly as our données; for we would make always an independent and evangelical, rather than a contingent, creation… . We throw away so much and make so much of the meager remainder. We make a great beauty, which is devastated of everything but form and gait.
—R. P. Blackmur, 1958

Is it possible that the significance of the New York School has been misconstrued? Is it possible that the much vaunted “triumph” of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s—when, for the first time in our history, an entire “school” of advanced American painting commanded international attention and acclaim—might not, after all, have been the unqualified artistic success it is nowadays taken to be by all the organs