the word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers.... one of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'.... (abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

Willem de Kooning, MOMA Bull., pp. 4, 6; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 104.