The 1969 canvas Spiked Red (Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Bienstock, New York) demonstrates Lipsky's then-approach: close hues, bright color waves and bursts.

In The New York Times, the critic Hilton Kramer found that the painter's work looked both to the aesthetic past and future: "Miss Lipsky reintroduces the drip, splatter and smear of abstract expressionism for notable anti-expressionist purposes ... She also demonstrates a very clear identity of her own.

Lipsky was invited to participate in the influential 1970-1971 Lyrical Abstraction exhibition which traveled the country and culminated at New York's Whitney Museum; the critic Noel Frackman highlighted her contributions for freshness, gesture and exuberance, finding the style "sustained a mood which celebrates the sheer splendor of color.

[4] She had also begun to explore, as the critic Katherine Crum later wrote, a pictorial vocabulary in direct challenge to her roots in lyrical abstraction.

The New Yorker magazine instead drew a connection of her work in this period to the "classic" style of calmly modernist painters Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.

"[11] The critic David Cohen, in The New York Sun, noted instead the opposite of classicism, "a steely, seemingly dispassionate composure" that contained "seething reserves of aesthetic emotion," stating, "Lipsky is not merely the dean of contemporary geometric abstraction but its dominatrix.

As critic Carter Ratcliff wrote in his catalogue essay, "Lipsky emerged in the forefront of a generation of painters," and added "Each of these paintings draws us into the extended exuberant moment of its creation—intuiting the artist’s power to reconcile uninhibited spontaneity with disciplined judgement.

While Lipsky is sometimes identified with the Post-Painterly Abstraction school centered around the critic Clement Greenberg, a long-time friend of the painter,[16] others have disputed this view.

My reading of Proust and Eliot, my viewing of Bellini and Giorgione and Titian and Albers and Cornell and Pollock, my listening to Bach and Thelonious Monk, my liking Eric Rohmer and Monty Python might seem totally unrelated, but they teach the same lesson: differences matter.