"The impressionists unbolted the door to the traditional art world but Wassily Kandinsky, Kurt Schwitters and Louise Nevelson, among others, flung it open wide to a new breed of visual artists. The advent of abstraction in painting and sculpture swept past the constraints that excluded most of us from seeing ourselves as artists because we didn’t produce pleasing likenesses of people, places and things. It awakened us to the possibilities of creating beautiful compositions from pure shapes and colors which needn’t bear any resemblance to the recognizable world around us, as well as to the use of materials not previously considered to be art supplies."