b'career. When he graduated from Yale in 1972, African American artists were expected to confront themes of racial and cultural identity. Whitney preferred to develop an abstract visual language of chromatic experimentation. In the 1990s he began to arrange the canvas in loose grids, but kept a rapid, light, and free application of color.Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1940, Martha Jungwirth graduated from the Universitt fr angewandte Kunst Wien in 1963, when gestural action painting was transforming into performance art. Jungwirth was a member of the artists group Wirklichkeiten (Realities), which received a positive review from art historian and museum director Alfred Schmeller, whom she later married. Some think this made the art world hesitant to embrace her. 6Jungwirth works intuitively, painting in oil and watercolor on brown paper and cardboard that she later mounts on canvas. Her work relates to action painting in many ways : dabs of paint, finger marks, and footprints all bear witness to the artists physical interaction with paint and ground. The result looks sometimes almost aggressive but also sensitive and poetic.All of these artists have explored the visual and tactile pleasuresand sometimes the painthat abstract painting can express. It is about time they got the recognition they deserve.Endnotes1Jackson Pollock : Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States? , Life 27, no. 6 (August 8, 1949):pp. 4245.2Griselda Pollock, Between a Rock and a Hard Place : Strategies for Histories of Abstraction with Woman on Your Mind, in Action, Gesture, Paint : Women Artists and Global Abstraction 19401970, exh. cat. (London : Whitechapel Gallery, 2023), p. 14. 3See Michel Tapi, Un art autre (Paris : Gabriel-Giraud et fils, 1952).4See Ellen G. Landau, Space Poetry : The Action Paintings of Michael West (New York : Hollis Taggart, 2019), p. 14.5See Lisa N. Peters, Statement /Biography : Lynne Drexler (19281999) (New York : Berry Campbell, n. d.). Available online at www.berrycampbell.com /artist /Lynne_Drexler /info /.6See Martha Jungwirth : Biography (New York, Tokyo, and St. Barth : Fergus McCaffrey, n. d.). Available online at https : / /fergusmccaffrey.com /artist /martha-jungwirth /.'