From “Ninth street women” Mary Gabriel.
“ Artists who were able to , who needed to work despite the desolation of the times, had been forced to look deeper for a subject, to look inside the only thing they could be sure of – themselves. The result was abstraction free of anything but the material with which the art was made and the naked energy of the artist who produced it. These were individual, personal works, conforming to no school and utterly devoid of politics. And yet each piece, however unintentionally, did serve a greater social function. The work of the artists in post war New York, like the work of artists during troubled periods throughout history, acted as a kind of beacon, a ping from hidden depths reminding those who searched for it that, all evidence to the contrary, civilization had not perished: If there is art, there is hope. Man is not a monster, because he yearns for truth and is capable of producing great beauty. “