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Abstract expressionism

A post World War II art style and the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world.

The term "abstract expressionism" for the movement was first applied in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. The name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism.
Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early twentieth century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey.

The exposure to and assimilation of European modernism together with the political climate after World War II set the stage for the American artmovement. The McCarthy era was a time of artistic censorship in the United States and did not long tolerate the social protests of the American social realism painters, but if the subject matter were totally abstract then it would be seen as apolitical, and therefore safe. Or if the art was political, the message was largely for the insiders.

In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York. From gestural painters like Pollock, De Kooning and Hofmann who made use of Surrealist techniques of automatic art to the rectangles of color that Colour Field artists like Rothko, Newman, Still used and are not what would usually be called expressionist.
Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches, and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.

The movement is closely associated with artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and others like Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Ad Reinhardt, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos, Lee Krasner, William Baziotes and Adolph Gottlieb.

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Associated subjects: jackson pollock (+), willem de kooning (+), barnett newman (+), mark rothko (+), surrealists (+), matisse (+), alberto giacometti (+), franz kline (+), david smith (+), sam francis (+), alfred jensen (+), action painting (+), lyrical abstraction (+), art-informel (+), tachism (+), color field painting (+), modern art (+), paul klee (+), abstract art (+), der blaue reiter (+), robert motherwell (+), arshile gorky (+), david hare (+), moore (+), morris louis (+), william baziotes (+), automatism (+), colour-field (+), canvas (+), miro (+)

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