In midcentury New York City, artists approached painting with revolutionary fervor. The aim was nothing less than "to wrest truth from the void," as Barnett Newman proclaimed in 1945. The paintings made by Newman were visionary, as were the canvases of fellow abstractionists including Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella. They were as compositionally innovative and artistically compelling as the quilts being stitched in Gee's Bend, Alabama.