Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism emerged in the United States as a distinct artistic movement following World War II, achieving widespread recognition during the 1950s. This development marked a significant departure from the American social realism prevalent in the 1930s, which had been shaped by the Great Depression and the influence of Mexican muralists. Art critic Robert Coates first applied the term to American art in 1946. The New York School, serving as the movement's epicenter, featured prominent artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov, and Lee Krasner, among others.

Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the center of this movement, included such artists as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov, and Lee Krasner among others.

This artistic movement extended beyond painting to encompass influential collagists and sculptors, including David Smith and Louise Nevelson. Abstract expressionism drew significant inspiration from the spontaneous and subconscious creative processes characteristic of Surrealist artists such as André Masson and Max Ernst. Practitioners of the movement integrated the emotional intensity found in German Expressionism with the innovative visual lexicons of European avant-garde movements, including Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism.

Characterized by its rebellious and idiosyncratic nature, abstract expressionism encompassed a diverse array of artistic styles. It marked the first distinctly American movement to attain international prominence, repositioning New York City as the nexus of the Western art world, a role previously held by Paris. Contemporary art critics were instrumental in its evolution. Figures such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg championed the works of abstract expressionist artists, notably Jackson Pollock, through their critical writings and patronage. Rosenberg's influential concept of the canvas as an "arena in which to act" was fundamental in shaping the methodology of action painters. By the early 1960s, the cultural dominance of abstract expressionism in the United States had waned. The subsequent repudiation of its emphasis on individualism fostered the emergence of movements such as Pop art and Minimalism. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the impact of abstract expressionism remained discernible in various artistic currents across the U.S. and Europe, including Tachisme and Neo-expressionism.

The designation "abstract expressionism" is thought to have originated in Germany in 1919, appearing in the magazine Der Sturm in connection with German Expressionism. Alfred Barr subsequently employed this term in 1929 to characterize Wassily Kandinsky's artworks. In the United States, Robert Coates utilized the term in 1946 within his review of eighteen paintings by Hans Hofmann.

Style

Surrealism stands as a significant precursor, distinguished by its focus on spontaneous, automatic, or subconscious artistic generation. Jackson Pollock's technique of dripping paint onto a floor-laid canvas derives from the practices of André Masson, Max Ernst, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Recent scholarship increasingly positions the exiled Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen as a pivotal artist and theoretician who advanced the concept of a viewer-dependent possibility space through his artworks and his periodical, DYN. Paalen explored principles of quantum mechanics and developed distinctive interpretations of totemic vision and the spatial organization found in Indigenous painting from British Columbia, thereby laying conceptual groundwork for the emergent spatial perspectives of young American abstract artists. His extensive essay, Totem Art (1943), significantly influenced artists including Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Approximately in 1944, Barnett Newman endeavored to elucidate America's nascent art movement, compiling a list of "the men in the new movement." Paalen appears twice on this list, alongside artists such as Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Hofmann, Baziotes, and Gorky. Robert Motherwell is noted with a query. Another crucial early manifestation of what would become abstract expressionism is evident in the oeuvre of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, particularly his "white writing" canvases, which, despite their typically modest scale, foreshadow the "all-over" aesthetic characteristic of Pollock's drip paintings.

The designation of this artistic movement originates from the synthesis of the German Expressionists' profound emotional intensity and asceticism with the anti-figurative principles characteristic of European abstract art schools, including Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. Furthermore, the movement is often perceived as rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and, by some, nihilistic. Practically, the term encompasses a diverse group of artists, primarily based in New York, who exhibited distinct styles, and it even extends to works that are neither overtly abstract nor expressionist. Jay Meuser, a California abstract expressionist known for his non-objective style, articulated his philosophy regarding his painting Mare Nostrum: "It is far better to capture the glorious spirit of the sea than to paint all of its tiny ripples." Pollock's dynamic "action paintings," characterized by their vibrant energy, diverge technically and aesthetically from Willem de Kooning's violent and grotesque figurative Women series, as well as from the chromatic rectangles of Rothko's Color Field paintings—works Rothko himself denied were abstract and which are not typically labeled expressionist. Despite these stylistic variations, all four artists are categorized as abstract expressionists.

Abstract Expressionism shares numerous stylistic resemblances with early 20th-century Russian artists, notably Wassily Kandinsky. While a sense of spontaneity, or its impression, was a hallmark of many Abstract Expressionist works, the majority of these paintings necessitated meticulous planning, particularly given their substantial scale. For artists like Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Emma Kunz, and later Rothko, Newman, and Agnes Martin, abstract art served as a clear vehicle for expressing concepts related to the spiritual, the unconscious, and the human psyche.

The widespread adoption of this artistic style in the 1950s remains a subject of scholarly discussion. During the 1930s, American social realism dominated the art scene, influenced significantly by both the Great Depression and the works of Mexican muralists like David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. However, the post-World War II political environment proved less receptive to the social commentary inherent in these painters' works. Abstract Expressionism emerged during the war years and gained initial exposure in the early 1940s at New York galleries, including The Art of This Century Gallery. The McCarthy era, following the war, imposed a period of artistic censorship in the United States. In this context, entirely abstract subject matter was often perceived as apolitical and thus less controversial. Alternatively, if the art conveyed political messages, these were frequently encoded for a specialized audience.

Although Abstract Expressionism is predominantly linked with painting, the collagist Anne Ryan and several sculptors played crucial roles within the movement. Notable sculptors considered significant members include David Smith, his wife Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, Ibram Lassaw, Theodore Roszak, Phillip Pavia, Mary Callery, Richard Stankiewicz, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson. Furthermore, artists such as David Hare, John Chamberlain, James Rosati, Mark di Suvero, and sculptors Richard Lippold, Raoul Hague, George Rickey, Reuben Nakian, Tony Smith, Seymour Lipton, Joseph Cornell, and numerous others were integral to the Abstract Expressionist movement. Many of these sculptors exhibited their work at the renowned Ninth Street Show, an exhibition organized by Leo Castelli in 1951 on East Ninth Street in New York City. Beyond painters and sculptors, the New York School of Abstract Expressionism also fostered a community of supportive poets, including Frank O'Hara, photographers like Aaron Siskind and Fred McDarrah (whose publication The Artist's World in Pictures chronicled the New York School in the 1950s), and filmmakers, most notably Robert Frank.

While the Abstract Expressionist school rapidly disseminated across the United States, its primary centers of influence were New York City and California's San Francisco Bay Area.

Post-World War II Art Critics

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

In the 1940s, the New York Vanguard faced a scarcity of both exhibition venues, such as The Art of This Century, Pierre Matisse Gallery, and Julien Levy Gallery, and critics prepared to engage with their work. A select group of artists, including Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman, also contributed to critical discourse, leveraging their literary backgrounds.

By the late 1940s, despite the New York avant-garde's relative obscurity, many artists now widely recognized benefited from established critical patronage. Clement Greenberg notably championed Jackson Pollock and Color Field painters including Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Hans Hofmann. Harold Rosenberg, conversely, appeared to favor action painters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, alongside the foundational works of Arshile Gorky. Concurrently, Thomas B. Hess, managing editor of ARTnews, was a prominent advocate for Willem de Kooning.

These emerging critics advanced their favored artists by either categorizing others as mere "followers" or by disregarding those whose work did not align with their promotional objectives.

In 1958, Mark Tobey achieved a significant milestone, becoming the first American painter since Whistler in 1895 to secure the top award at the Venice Biennale.

Barnett Newman, a later addition to the Uptown Group, contributed catalogue forewords and reviews. By the late 1940s, he began exhibiting his own art at the Betty Parsons Gallery, holding his inaugural solo show in 1948. Shortly after this exhibition, Newman articulated a profound statement during an Artists' Session at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image." Newman strategically employed his literary abilities to solidify his burgeoning artistic identity and to advance his oeuvre. A notable illustration of this is his letter dated April 9, 1955, addressed to Sidney Janis, where he asserted: "— it is true that Rothko talks the fighter. He fights, however, to submit to the philistine world. My struggle against bourgeois society has involved the total rejection of it."

Clement Greenberg, a New York Trotskyist, is widely considered to have been a primary figure in the promotion of this artistic style. Serving as a long-standing art critic for the Partisan Review and The Nation, he emerged as an early and articulate advocate for Abstract Expressionism. Robert Motherwell, an artist of considerable means, collaborated with Greenberg in advancing a style that resonated with the prevailing political atmosphere and the intellectual dissent of the period.

Greenberg declared Abstract Expressionism, and specifically Pollock's contributions, to be the zenith of aesthetic achievement. He defended Pollock's oeuvre through a formalistic lens, positing it as the preeminent painting of its time and the culmination of an artistic lineage tracing back through Cubism and Cézanne to Monet. This tradition, in Greenberg's view, progressively refined painting towards an ever-'purer' state, concentrating on the 'essential' act of mark-making on a two-dimensional plane.

Pollock's artistic output consistently elicited divergent critical responses. Rosenberg characterized Pollock's work as transforming painting into an existential drama, where "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." He further posited that "The big moment came when it was decided to paint 'just to paint'. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value—political, aesthetic, moral."

John Canaday, the art critic for The New York Times, stood out as a prominent detractor of Abstract Expressionism during its formative period. Conversely, Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg, alongside Greenberg and Rosenberg, were influential post-war art historians who publicly endorsed the movement. In the early to mid-1960s, a new generation of art critics, including Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and Robert Hughes, significantly enriched the ongoing critical discourse surrounding Abstract Expressionism.

History

World War II and the Post-War Period

In the years preceding and throughout World War II, numerous modernist artists, writers, poets, and significant collectors and dealers sought refuge in the United States, escaping the Nazi regime's advance in Europe. A substantial number of those who did not evacuate tragically perished. Among the notable figures who arrived in New York during the war, some assisted by Varian Fry, were Hans Namuth, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, Max Ernst, Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, Leo Castelli, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, Roberto Matta, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Fernand Léger, and Piet Mondrian. Conversely, a select few artists, including Picasso, Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard, chose to remain in France and survived the conflict.

The post-war era plunged European capitals into disarray, necessitating urgent economic and physical reconstruction alongside political realignment. Paris, once the epicenter of European culture and the global art capital, experienced a catastrophic artistic environment, leading to New York's ascendancy as the new international art hub. Post-war Europe witnessed the persistence of Surrealism, Cubism, Dada, and Matisse's oeuvre. Concurrently, Art Brut and Lyrical Abstraction, also known as Tachisme (the European counterpart to abstract expressionism), gained prominence among the emerging generation. Notable figures in post-war European painting include Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël, Georges Mathieu, Vieira da Silva, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Pierre Soulages, and Jean Messagier. Meanwhile, in the United States, a new cohort of American artists rose to global prominence, identified as abstract expressionists.

Gorky, Hofmann, and Graham

The 1940s in New York City marked the ascendancy of American abstract expressionism, a modernist movement synthesizing influences from Matisse, Picasso, Surrealism, Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early Modernism. This synthesis was facilitated by prominent educators in the United States, notably Hans Hofmann from Germany and John D. Graham from Ukraine. Graham's impact on American art in the early 1940s was especially evident in the oeuvres of Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart, among others. Gorky's profound contributions to American and global art are widely recognized. His lyrical abstraction introduced a "new language" and "lit the way for two generations of American artists." The spontaneous painterly quality of his mature works, such as The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, The Betrothal II, and One Year the Milkweed, directly anticipated Abstract Expressionism, with New York School leaders acknowledging his significant influence. Hyman Bloom's early work also played an influential role. American artists further benefited from the presence of figures like Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, and the André Breton group, as well as institutions such as Pierre Matisse's gallery and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, The Art of This Century, among other contributing factors. Hans Hofmann, as a teacher, mentor, and artist, was particularly crucial and influential in fostering the development and success of abstract expressionism in the United States. His protégés included Clement Greenberg, who became an immensely influential critic of American painting, and his students included Lee Krasner, who subsequently introduced Hofmann to her husband, Jackson Pollock.

Pollock and Abstract Influences

In the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's groundbreaking approach to painting fundamentally transformed the potential of subsequent Contemporary art. Pollock recognized, to a significant degree, that the artistic process itself held as much importance as the final artwork. Similar to Picasso's innovative reconfigurations of painting and sculpture around the turn of the century through Cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined artistic production, drawing on diverse influences such as Navajo sand paintings, Surrealism, Jungian analysis, and Mexican mural art. His departure from traditional easel painting and conventional methods served as a liberating impetus for artists of his time and those who followed. Artists understood that Pollock's distinctive process—involving the placement of unstretched raw canvas on the floor, allowing it to be approached from all sides with both artistic and industrial materials; the dripping and throwing of linear skeins of paint; and the incorporation of drawing, staining, brushing, and both figural and non-figural elements—extended the boundaries of art-making beyond any previous limits. Abstract Expressionism, as a broader movement, expanded and refined the definitions and possibilities available to artists for creating new works.

Following Pollock's seminal contributions, other Abstract Expressionists also achieved significant artistic advancements. The collective innovations of artists such as Pollock, de Kooning, Franz Kline, Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Motherwell, and Peter Voulkos profoundly influenced the subsequent diversity and breadth of artistic expression. Radical Anti-Formalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, Conceptual art, and the feminist art movement, derive conceptual lineage from Abstract Expressionism. However, critical re-evaluations of abstract art by historians like Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, and Catherine de Zegher highlight that pioneering women artists, despite making substantial innovations in modern art, were historically marginalized in official narratives. These artists eventually gained long-overdue recognition in the period following the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Abstract Expressionism solidified its status as a major art movement in New York City during the 1950s, leading prominent art galleries to feature Abstract Expressionists in exhibitions and as integral parts of their artist rosters. Notable 'uptown' galleries included the Charles Egan Gallery, the Sidney Janis Gallery, the Betty Parsons Gallery, the Kootz Gallery, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Stable Gallery, and the Leo Castelli Gallery. Concurrently, several 'downtown' establishments, collectively known as the Tenth Street galleries, showcased numerous emerging younger artists working within the Abstract Expressionist idiom.

Action Painting

Action painting, a prevalent artistic style from the 1940s to the early 1960s, is intrinsically linked with Abstract Expressionism; indeed, some critics have employed the terms synonymously. This American artistic movement is frequently compared with the French art movement known as Tachisme.

The American critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term 'Action Painting' in 1952, marking a significant reorientation in the aesthetic discourse among New York School artists and critics. Rosenberg posited that the canvas functioned as "an arena in which to act." While Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning had consistently articulated a view of painting as a space for engaging with the creative act, earlier sympathetic critics, such as Clement Greenberg, emphasized the "objectness" of their works. For Greenberg, the physical characteristics of the paintings—specifically their clotted and oil-caked surfaces—were paramount to interpreting them as records of the artists' existential struggles.

Rosenberg's critical framework redirected scholarly attention from the finished art object to the creative struggle itself, viewing the completed painting merely as a physical manifestation or 'residue' of the actual artistic endeavor, which resided in the process of its creation. This spontaneous engagement constituted the painter's "action," executed through dynamic arm and wrist movements, expressive gestures, brushstrokes, and various applications such as thrown, splashed, stained, scumbled, and dripped paint. Artists occasionally allowed paint to drip onto the canvas while engaging in rhythmic movement, or even by physically entering the canvas space. This method sometimes involved permitting paint to fall in accordance with subconscious impulses, thereby enabling the unconscious psyche to assert and express itself. However, precisely articulating or interpreting these phenomena remains challenging, given their purported origin as unconscious manifestations of pure creative acts.

The designation "abstract expressionism" is frequently applied to numerous artists, primarily based in New York, despite their diverse stylistic approaches, and occasionally encompasses works that are neither distinctly abstract nor expressionistic. For instance, Pollock's dynamic "action paintings," characterized by their intricate visual density, diverge significantly, both technically and aesthetically, from De Kooning's intense and often distorted Women series. Woman V belongs to a sequence of six paintings created by de Kooning from 1950 to 1953, each portraying a three-quarter-length female figure. The artist commenced the initial work in this series, Woman I, in June 1950, undertaking numerous revisions and overpaintings until January or February 1952, at which point the canvas was left incomplete. Subsequently, art historian Meyer Schapiro observed the painting in de Kooning's studio and advocated for the artist's continued engagement with the theme. In response, de Kooning initiated three additional paintings exploring the identical subject: Woman II, Woman III, and Woman IV. Throughout the summer of 1952, while residing in East Hampton, de Kooning further developed this thematic concept through sketches and pastels. Completion of Woman I likely occurred by late June or potentially as late as November 1952, with the other three "Woman" paintings presumably finished around the same period. The Woman series unequivocally represents a collection of figurative paintings.

Franz Kline represents another significant artist within this movement. Similar to Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, Kline was categorized as an "action painter" due to his seemingly spontaneous and vigorous technique, which prioritized brushwork and canvas manipulation over explicit figuration or imagery, exemplified by his painting Number 2 (1954).

Automatic writing served as a crucial method for action painters including Kline (particularly in his monochromatic works), Pollock, Mark Tobey, and Cy Twombly. These artists employed gesture, surface texture, and line to generate calligraphic, linear symbols and intricate patterns that evoked linguistic forms and resonated as potent expressions of the collective unconscious. In his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, Robert Motherwell produced impactful black and white paintings, utilizing gesture, surface, and symbolism to elicit profound emotional responses.

Concurrently, other action painters, including de Kooning, Gorky, Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, and James Brooks, incorporated imagery, either through abstract landscapes or expressionistic depictions of the human figure, to convey their deeply personal and potent artistic statements. James Brooks's paintings were notably poetic and remarkably anticipatory of Lyrical Abstraction, a movement that gained prominence during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Color Field

Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, whose work features serenely shimmering blocks of color (and which Rothko himself disavowed as abstract or typically expressionistic), are categorized as abstract expressionists. However, they belong to what Clement Greenberg identified as the Color Field tendency within abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell are accurately characterized as practitioners of both Action Painting and Color Field Painting. During the 1940s, Richard Pousette-Dart's meticulously structured imagery frequently drew upon mythological and mystical themes, a characteristic also evident in the paintings of Gottlieb and Pollock during the same decade.

Initially, Color Field painting was categorized as a distinct form of abstract expressionism, notably encompassing the works of Rothko, Still, Newman, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and various series by Joan Miró. Clement Greenberg identified Color Field painting as a style that shared affinities with Action painting yet maintained its own unique characteristics. Practitioners of Color Field painting aimed to divest their artistic creations of any extraneous rhetorical elements. Prominent artists such as Motherwell, Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, and Mark Tobey, alongside Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman—whose seminal work Vir heroicus sublimis is housed at MoMA—employed minimal naturalistic references and demonstrated a sophisticated, psychologically resonant application of color. These artists generally eschewed recognizable imagery, though Rothko and Gottlieb occasionally incorporated symbols and signs as substitutes for representational forms. While some artists integrated allusions to historical or contemporary art, Color Field painting primarily posited abstraction as an intrinsic objective. Through this modernist approach, artists endeavored to render each painting as a singular, unified, and monolithic visual entity.

Contrasting with the intense emotionality and gestural brushwork characteristic of Abstract Expressionists like Pollock and de Kooning, Color Field painters initially presented a cool and austere aesthetic. They minimized individual marks, instead favoring expansive, flat color fields, which they regarded as fundamental to visual abstraction. This approach also extended to the physical shape of the canvas, a concept Frank Stella notably explored in the 1960s through unconventional combinations of curved and straight edges. Nevertheless, Color Field painting ultimately demonstrated a capacity for both sensuality and profound expressiveness, albeit through methods distinct from those of gestural Abstract Expressionism.

While Abstract Expressionism rapidly disseminated across the United States, its primary hubs were New York City and California, particularly within the New York School and the San Francisco Bay Area. Abstract Expressionist artworks exhibit common attributes, such as the utilization of expansive canvases and an "all-over" compositional strategy, where the entire surface is accorded uniform significance rather than emphasizing a central focal point over the periphery. The concept of the canvas as an arena served as a fundamental principle for Action painting, whereas the integrity of the picture plane became a core tenet for Color Field painters. Throughout the 1950s, a new generation of artists, including Alfred Leslie, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, Milton Resnick, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, Friedel Dzubas, and Robert Goodnough, also commenced exhibiting works influenced by Abstract Expressionism.

While Pollock's distinctive style, technique, painterly touch, and physical application of paint strongly associate him with Action Painting, art critics have also drawn parallels between his work and Color Field painting. A notable critical perspective, advanced by Greenberg, connects Pollock's allover canvases to Claude Monet's large-scale Water Lilies series from the 1920s. Critics such as Michael Fried and Greenberg have observed that the overarching impression conveyed by Pollock's most renowned creations—his drip paintings—is that of expansive fields composed of accumulated linear elements. They note that these works frequently manifest as vast complexes of similarly-valued paint skeins and comprehensive fields of color and drawing, echoing the mural-sized Monets, which are similarly constructed from closely-valued brushed and scumbled marks that also resolve into fields of color and drawing. Pollock's adoption of all-over composition establishes both a philosophical and physical link to the methods employed by Color Field painters like Newman, Rothko, and Still in constructing their unbroken, and in Still's case, broken surfaces. In several paintings executed after his seminal drip painting period (1947–1950), Pollock utilized the technique of staining fluid oil and house paint directly into raw canvas. During 1951, he produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings, followed by color stain paintings in 1952. His November 1952 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City featured Number 12, 1952, a monumental and masterful stain painting reminiscent of a vibrantly colored, stained landscape, overlaid with broadly dripped dark paint; this work was acquired by Nelson Rockefeller for his personal collection directly from the exhibition.

Arshile Gorky, recognized as a foundational figure of Abstract Expressionism and a Surrealist, was also among the earliest painters of the New York School to employ the staining technique. Gorky developed expansive fields of vivid, open, and continuous color, which he frequently utilized as grounds in many of his paintings. In his most impactful and accomplished works between 1941 and 1948, he consistently applied intense stained fields of color, often allowing the paint to run and drip beneath and around his characteristic lexicon of organic and biomorphic forms and delicate lines. James Brooks represents another Abstract Expressionist whose works from the 1940s foreshadow the stain paintings prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s. Brooks regularly incorporated staining as a technique in his paintings from the late 1940s onward. He began diluting his oil paint to achieve fluid colors suitable for pouring, dripping, and staining onto the predominantly raw canvas he favored. These compositions frequently integrated calligraphy with abstract shapes. During the final three decades of his career, Sam Francis's distinctive style of large-scale, bright Abstract Expressionism became closely associated with Color Field painting. His oeuvre effectively straddled both primary factions within the Abstract Expressionist rubric: Action Painting and Color Field painting.

Inspired by Pollock's 1951 paintings, which featured thinned black oil paint stained into raw canvas, Frankenthaler commenced producing stain paintings using various oil colors on raw canvas in 1952. Her most celebrated work from that period is Mountains and Sea. She is recognized as one of the originators of the Color Field movement, which emerged in the late 1950s. Frankenthaler also undertook studies with Hans Hofmann.

Hofmann's artistic output, exemplified by The Gate, 1959–1960, is characterized by a vibrant chromatic palette. He achieved recognition not only as a painter but also as an influential art educator, initially in his native Germany and subsequently in the United States. Arriving in the U.S. from Germany in the early 1930s, Hofmann introduced the principles of Modernism. During his formative years as an artist in pre-World War I Paris, Hofmann collaborated with Robert Delaunay and gained direct exposure to the groundbreaking contributions of Picasso and Matisse. Matisse's oeuvre significantly impacted Hofmann's artistic perspective, particularly his comprehension of color's expressive capacity and the inherent potential of abstraction. Hofmann emerged as a pioneering theoretician of color field painting, and his conceptual frameworks profoundly influenced artists and critics, notably Clement Greenberg, throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1953, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland experienced a profound artistic shift after observing Helen Frankenthaler's stain paintings during a studio Upon their return to Washington, D.C., they commenced the creation of seminal works that established the color field movement in the late 1950s.

In 1972, Henry Geldzahler, then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, articulated the following:

Clement Greenberg featured the creations of both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in an exhibition he organized at the Kootz Gallery during the early 1950s. Greenberg was the initial observer to discern their artistic promise. He extended an invitation for them to This exceptionally beautiful work, which drew inspiration from both Pollock and Gorky, also represented one of the earliest stain pictures, a pioneering large-scale field painting employing the stain technique, possibly the very first. Louis and Noland observed the painting unrolled on the floor of her studio before returning to Washington, D.C., where they collaboratively explored the implications of this innovative painting approach for a period.

Developments in the 1960s following Abstract Expressionism

During the 1950s and 1960s, abstract painting witnessed the emergence of several novel directions, including Hard-edge painting, exemplified by John McLaughlin. Concurrently, as a counter-response to the inherent subjectivism of abstract expressionism, alternative forms of Geometric abstraction began to manifest in artists' studios and within progressive avant-garde circles. Greenberg assumed a prominent role in advocating for Post-painterly abstraction; by curating a significant exhibition of contemporary painting that toured major art institutions across the United States in 1964. This period saw the rise of Color field painting, Hard-edge painting, and Lyrical Abstraction as groundbreaking artistic trajectories.

Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War Context

Since the mid-1970s, scholarly discourse has posited that abstract expressionism garnered attention from the CIA in the early 1950s. The agency reportedly perceived the style as emblematic of the United States as a bastion of intellectual freedom and open markets, simultaneously challenging the socialist realist aesthetics prevalent in communist nations and the established dominance of European art markets. Frances Stonor Saunders' book, The Cultural Cold War—The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, (published in the UK as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War) meticulously details the CIA's financial and organizational involvement in promoting American abstract expressionists as a component of cultural imperialism through the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967. Notably, Robert Motherwell's series Elegy to the Spanish Republic directly addressed some of these political dimensions. Tom Braden, the inaugural chief of the CIA's International Organizations Division (IOD) and former executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art, stated in an interview that he considered it "the most crucial division the agency possessed" and believed "it played a monumental role in the Cold War."

Countering this revisionist perspective, an essay by Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic for The New York Times, titled Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics and the Cold War, contends that a substantial portion of the information regarding the American art scene during the 1940s and 1950s, along with the revisionists' interpretations, is either inaccurate or decontextualized. Additional scholarly works on this topic include Art in the Cold War by Christine Lindey, which also examines Soviet Union art from the same era, and Pollock and After, edited by Francis Frascina, which republished Kimmelman's article.

Ramifications

Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923–2002), a member of the Montreal-based surrealist-inspired group Les Automatistes, contributed to the introduction of a related abstract impressionist style to the Parisian art world starting in 1949. Michel Tapié's seminal book, Un Art Autre (1952), also proved profoundly influential in this context. Tapié, who was also a curator and exhibition organizer, championed the art of Pollock and Hans Hofmann across Europe. By the 1960s, the movement's initial impact had been absorbed, yet its methodologies and proponents continued to exert significant artistic influence, profoundly shaping the output of subsequent artists. Abstract expressionism served as a precursor to and influenced subsequent movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including Tachisme, Color Field painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Fluxus, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, and Neo-expressionism. Conversely, movements that emerged as direct responses to or rebellions against abstract expressionism included Hard-edge painting, exemplified by artists such as Frank Stella and Robert Indiana, and Pop Art, with prominent figures like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein in the United States, alongside Richard Hamilton in Britain. In the United States, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns established a crucial link between abstract expressionism and Pop Art. Minimalism, for instance, found its exemplars in artists like Donald Judd, Robert Mangold, and Agnes Martin.

Nevertheless, many painters, including Jules Olitski, Joan Mitchell, and Antoni Tàpies, persisted in employing the abstract expressionist style for an extended period, thereby extending and broadening its visual and philosophical dimensions, a practice continued by numerous contemporary abstract artists through styles such as Lyrical Abstraction and Neo-expressionism.

In the aftermath of World War II, a collective of New York artists established one of the inaugural distinct artistic schools in America, inaugurating a new epoch in American art through abstract expressionism. This development catalyzed a significant American art boom, fostering the emergence of styles like Pop Art. Concurrently, it contributed to New York City's transformation into a prominent cultural and artistic center.

Abstract Expressionists prioritize the dynamic organism over the static whole, emphasize becoming over being, privilege expression over perfection, favor vitality over mere finish, prefer fluctuation to repose, value feeling above rigid formulation, embrace the unknown over the known, the veiled over the clear, the individual over societal norms, and the inner experience over external appearance.

Major sculpture

List of abstract expressionists

Abstract expressionist artists

Significant artists whose mature work defined American abstract expressionism:

Other artists

Significant artists whose mature work relates to the American abstract expressionist movement:

Related styles, trends, schools, and movements

Related styles, trends, schools, and movements

Other related topics

• Bluebeard, by Kurt Vonnegut, presents a fictional autobiography attributed to the fictional abstract expressionist Rabo Karabekian.
• Michel Tapié (critic and exhibition organizer instrumental in disseminating abstract expressionism in Europe, Japan, and Latin America)

References

Books

• Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Spontaneity. Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1998. ISBN 978-966-359-305-0
• Anfam, David. Abstract Expressionism (New York & London: Thames & Hudson, 1990). ISBN 0-500-20243-5
• Craven, David, Abstract expressionism as cultural critique: dissent during the McCarthy period (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.) ISBN 0-521-43415-7
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract and Figurative Expressionism: Style Is Timely Art Is Timeless (New York School Press, 2009.) ISBN 978-0-9677994-2-1
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4
• Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6
• Papanikolas, Theresa and Stephen Salel, Stephen, Abstract Expressionism, Looking East from the Far West, Honolulu Museum of Art, 2017, ISBN 9780937426920
• Serge Guilbaut. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Bibliography

• Anfam, David. Abstract Expressionism—A World Elsewhere. New York: Haunch of Venison, 2008.
• Greenberg, Clement. "'American-Type' Painting". In Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, pp. 208–29.
• Jachec, Nancy. The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism 1940–1960. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000, ISBN 0-521-65154-9.
• O'Connor, Francis V. Jackson Pollock [exhibition catalogue]. New York: Museum of Modern Art, [1967], OCLC 165852.
• Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2000, ISBN 1-56584-596-X.
• Tapié, Michel. Hans Hofmann: Paintings 1962: April 23 – May 18, 1963. Paris: Galerie Anderson-Mayer, 1963. [Exhibition catalogue and commentary], OCLC 62515192.
• Tapié, Michel. Pollock. Paris: P. Facchetti, 1952, OCLC 30601793.
• Wechsler, Jeffrey. (2007). Pathways and Parallels: Roads to Abstract Expressionism. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, ISBN 978-0-9759954-9-5.

• Jackson Pollock
• Philip Guston
• Perle Fine Abstract Expressionism-1950s New York action painter on YouTube
• Albert Kotin Abstract Expressionism 1950s-New York School 1950s action painting on YouTube
• James Brooks Abstract Expressionism-New York School 1950s action painting on YouTube
• Beginning of the New York School 1950s-Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s on YouTube
• Abstract expressionism 1950s-New York School Artists of the 9th St Show Reminisce on YouTube
• Nicolas Carone-Abstract Expressionism-Artist of the 9th St. Show on YouTube
• Robert Richenburg Abstract Expressionism 1950s-New York School 1950s on YouTube
• HENI Talks, What is: Abstract Expressionism?