Abstract Expressionism's official story was curated to center men

Gabriel argues that the celebrated narrative of Abstract Expressionism — heroic, solitary male painters wrestling with existential anguish on enormous canvases — was substantially a construction of postwar critics, gallerists, and curators who found that story more marketable and more consistent with prevailing assumptions about serious art being a masculine pursuit. Women working in the same studios, exhibitions, and social circles were frequently present at the movement's founding moments but got written out or minimized in the histories written afterward.

She traces how specific exhibitions and critical essays repeatedly featured the same handful of male names while women who had participated in the same formative shows, sometimes from the very beginning, were quietly dropped from later accounts or relegated to a single sentence.

This erasure wasn't simply an oversight; Gabriel presents evidence that it was actively reinforced by gendered assumptions about whose work counted as major and whose was merely decorative or derivative, regardless of actual influence or quality. Takeaway: the accepted history of a movement can be shaped as much by who gets excluded from the telling as by who's included.