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Bear in mind the term did not come from any of the painters so-designated, but from the art critic Robert Coates who applied it to the New York artists in 1946. The term itself was coined in Germany (where else?) in 1919, and was first used to characterize the work of a specific artist (Wassily Kandinsky), in 1929. Many of the painters on the list have vehemently denied that their work was abstract.
My “American Heritage Dictionary“ lists five principal definitions of abstract, of which only the fifth has anything to do with art: Designating a genre of painting whose intellectual and affective content depends solely on intrinsic form.