After spending the summer teaching at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, de Kooning returned to New York and pursued two directions, beginning a second series of Woman compositions, more violent and grotesque than those before them, and making additional black-and-white paintings. The abstractions reversed the black-and-white polarity of the preceding works so that white now dominated the palette, causing critics to dub the two series “positives” and “negatives.” The new series included two large compositions, Attic and Excavation. The latter, the climactic work of the series, was labored over for many months, and soon became acknowledged as the masterpiece of his early career.