The Museum of Modern Art opened on November 8, 1929, in several rented rooms on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building—today the Crown Building—at 730 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Lee Krasner (1908–1984) visited the exhibition on November 9 with several of her classmates from the National Academy of Design. “We disbanded after leaving the show, and there was no time to compare notes…but the after-affects were automatic,” Krasner recollected later to the art critic Lawrence Campbell. “A freeing…an opening of a door. Seeing those French paintings (the inaugural exhibition featured Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat) stirred my anger against any form of provincialism.” Apples painted from still life for her student work at the Academy began to sit differently in the picture space. Similarly, as the story goes, after seeing their first Matisse and Picasso works, she and fellow students responded with shapes, colors, and compositional choices that caused their portrait instructor to hurl paintbrushes across the classroom and exclaim, “I can’t teach you people anything.” While Krasner valued her foundational art training, these experiences exemplified the attitudes of the time. In the late-1920s and early-1930s art circles of New York City, there was enormous debate and upheaval around the notion of what makes a picture interesting. Abstraction was taking hold in the broadest sense, and European avant-garde movements like De Stijl were beginning to influence American art forms.