But after moving to Greece I found myself pretty out of the loop when it came to what was going
on back in the States, so in the spring of this year I
decided to refocus my blog and turned it into a
personal style diary.
Especially as the competition between national schools of abstract painting escalated, breaking out in arguments and even punches in the case of Kline and the French painter Jean Fautrier, it would follow that the internal competition within these national schools also intensified.27 This was certainly true
on the French side at the Venice Biennale: in a very unusual move, two artists — Fautrier and Hans Hartung — were awarded Grand Prizes in painting, whereas normally only one was given, because the jury could not
decide between the two contenders.28 Within the context of the politics internal to the movement of abstract expressionism, Meryon could thus be seen as a reassertion of Kline's original, breakthrough
style as his own and thus a defence of his
personal artistic identity, after Kline himself had turned to colour, around 1955, and left it up for grabs.