Robert Motherwell on abstraction

From his essay "What Abstract Art Means to Me," 1951:

Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need.

The need is for felt experience--intense, immediate, direct, subltle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.

Everything that might dilute the experience is stripped away. The origin of abstraction in art is that of any mode of thought. Abstract art is a true mysticism--I dislike the word--or rather a series of mysticisms that grew up in the historical circumstance that all mysticisms do, from a primary sense of guly, an abyss, a void between one's lonely self and the world. Abstract art is an effort to close the void that modern men feel. Its abstraction is its emphasis.

One wonders what Motherwell would say about "funky abstraction," or someone like Mary Heilmann, or even Al Held.