“It was thought that there was something weaker about them because they were more thinly painted. And it was then that there was this sort of equation between these lightly painted pictures and her being a woman (though neither Mitchell nor Hartigan painted in this way). There were some people, like [critic] Harold Rosenberg, who was a big supporter of the idea of the painting being made out of heroic gestures. And with her work there are no gestures.”