It is one of the numerous conundrums of Abstract Expressionism that the foundations of the development lie in the metaphorical painting of the 1930s. Most of the artists who might later get to be abstract painters in New York in the 1940s and 1950s were stamped by the experience of the Great Depression, and they came to development whilst painting in styles affected by social authenticity and the Regionalist development. By the late 1940s most had deserted those styles, yet they gained much from