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Nicholas Krushenick has rightfully been called the father of pop abstraction, which suggests that a lot of what is currently going on owes something to him. And while this is certainly the case, this well-meaning sobriquet doesn't tell half the story. Krushenick's bigger, more radical accomplishment is that he made abstract paintings which have continued to successfully resist being domesticated by academic language, including the kind imported wholesale from France and Germany starting in the 1960s, and which are now ubiquitous in various states of dilution. Starting around 1962, just as Minimalism and Pop art were beginning to take off, to the point of becoming buzzwords in the popular press, Krushenick did the unthinkable. A contentious man, he said "fuck it" both to purity and to representational images derived from the mass media. To this end, he brought basic graphic signs and patterns from Western pop culture and Japanese woodcuts into the realm of hard-edged abstraction, while deftly suggesting spatiality through color and compositional structure (J. Yau, "Nicholas Krushenick", The Brooklyn Rail, June 2007, https://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/06/artseen/nicholas-krushenick.).