While New York and the world were yet
unfamiliar with the New York avant - garde by the late 1940s, most of the artists who have become household
names today had their well - established patron critics: Clement Greenberg advocated Jackson Pollock and the color field painters like Clyfford
Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and Hans Hofmann; Harold Rosenberg seemed to prefer the action painters such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, as well as the seminal paintings of Arshile Gorky; Thomas B. Hess, the managing editor of ARTnews, championed Willem de Kooning.