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Reviews the exhibition "Cy Twombly: 50 Years of Works on Paper," at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 8, 2005.

The article presents the author's comments on the painting by Joan Mitchell, which is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in the exhibition "American Art: 1940-1970." Mitchell was one of the strongest painters in the second generation of abstract expressionists, and she painted "Ladybug," as it is titled, in 1957, the year after abstract painter Jackson Pollock was killed. The author says that the internal drama of Mitchell's painting derives from the way she uses paint's propensity to drip to her own advantage by taming it with over-strokes of pigment through which she displays her own discipline and power.

In the catalogue for the posthumous exhibition of the work of artist Liubov Popova held in the Soviet Union in 1924, six months after she died of scarlet fever at the age of 35, the artist is cited thus: "No artistic success has given me as much satisfaction as the sight of a peasant or a worker buying a length of material designed by me." The syntax of the exhibition of Popova's work on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until April 23 must be very like that of the Soviet show of 1924. According to the author, the catalogue he began by quoting goes on to say that in the very spring in which she died, "all Moscow, Russia was wearing fabric with designs by Popova without knowing it, vivid, strong drawings, full of movement, like the artist's own nature." According to the author, her paintings all look like pictures of movement that merely aspire to vividness and strength.

The first American painter to have an impact on Japanese artists after the end of the war was Jackson Pollock, two of whose paintings were shown at an exhibition in Tokyo, Japan. It was Pollock, rather than any of the European painters to be seen in the Yomiuri exhibition of 1951, who seemed to the abstract painter Yoshihara Jiro to have pushed back the limits of painting in two ways: by thematizing the materiality of paint, through the use of pouring, dripping and splattering; and by incorporating the bodily gesture, the act of painting, into the product of painting. Through Yoshihara Jiro, Pollock's work became the paradigm for a group called the Gutai Art Association in Osaka, Japan. An exhibition of Gutai artists' work at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1958 was advertised as "Japanese Abstract Expressionism," and, to the degree that the show was noticed at all, it would almost certainly have been dismissed as a form of imitation, which in any case was one of the stereotypes of Japan in the American mind at the time.