For some of his contemporaries, non-objective painting was a holy thing.
Rebay and Bauer were devotees of Non-Objective painting, defined by Kandinsky as art with no detectable reference to real-world sources.
Thomas Benton was teaching there then "He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced righ into non-objective painting," Jackson says.
When the Guggenheim was founded in 1939, it was to be a museum of "non-objective painting" (museum jargon for abstract art).
This was several years before Mr. Gorky evolved from a brilliant self-taught student of European Modernism to a rapturous innovator, whose Surrealism-charged spin on non-objective painting paved the way for Abstract Expressionism.
It usually features linear non-objective painting in broad strokes, when it is not a maelstrom of curlicues, avoids strident, warring colors; is disciplined, decorative, and spiritually happy, rather than creatively morbid.
His theory seems to actually preclude Non-objective painting (Jacobson 1960), although he does speak positively of abstract art.
Freilicher studied with Hans Hofmann, absorbing his lessons about non-objective painting.
But their historical importance is undeniable, for as a group they were instrumental in establishing pure, objective landscape painting as a legitimate genre in France.
The personal element he brought to traditional objective landscape painting earned him the admiration of all those inspired by the Russian landscape.
The series Improvisations that followed preserved reminiscences of figuration, made illegible by the looseness of the pictorial structure; their diffuse and amorphous consistency had little connection with the main objectives of painting at the time.
