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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 muralism.The work of Mexican muralists would also influence the work of Jackson Pollock, a leading representative of the New York School and Abstract Expressionism. 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, and Lee Krasner among others.
The movement was not limited to painting but included influential collagists and sculptors, such as David Smith, Louise Nevelson, and others. Abstract expressionism was notably influenced by the spontaneous and subconscious creation methods of Surrealism artists like André Masson and Max Ernst. Artists associated with the movement combined the emotional intensity of German Expressionism with the radical visual vocabularies of European avant-garde schools like Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Cubism.
Abstract expressionism was seen as rebellious and idiosyncratic, encompassing various artistic styles. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Contemporary art critics played a significant role in its development. Critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg promoted the work of artists associated with abstract expressionism, in particular Jackson Pollock, through their writing and collecting. Rosenberg's concept of the canvas as an "arena in which to act" was pivotal in defining the approach of Action painting. The cultural reign of abstract expressionism in the United States had diminished by the early 1960s, while the subsequent rejection of the abstract expressionist emphasis on individualism led to the development of such movements as Pop art and Minimalism. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the influence of abstract expressionism can be seen in diverse movements in the U.S. and Europe, including Tachisme and Neo-expressionism, among others.
The term " abstract expressionism" is believed to have first been used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm in reference to German Expressionism. Alfred Barr used this term in 1929 to describe works by Wassily Kandinsky.Hess, Barbara; "Abstract Expressionism", 2005 The term was used in the United States in 1946 by Robert Coates in his review of 18 Hans Hofmann paintings.
The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German expressionism with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic.Shapiro, David/Cecile (2000), "Abstract Expressionism: The politics of apolitical painting." pp. 189–190 In: Frascina, Francis (2000–1): Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. 2nd ed. London: Routledge In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even to work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist. California abstract expressionist Jay Meuser, who typically painted in the non-objective style, wrote about 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 energetic "", with their "busy" feel, are different, both technically and aesthetically, from the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning's Figurative art and the rectangles of color in Rothko's Color Field paintings (which are not what would usually be called expressionist, and which Rothko denied were abstract). Yet all four artists are classified as abstract expressionists.
Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists' works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. With artists such as Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Emma Kunz, and later on Rothko, Newman, and Agnes Martin, abstract art clearly implied expression of ideas concerning the spiritual, the unconscious, and the mind.Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher (eds.). 3 X Abstraction. NY: The Drawing Center and /New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005., Cubi VI (1963), Israel Museum, Jerusalem. David Smith was one of the most influential American sculptors of the 20th century.]]
Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression, but also by the Mexican muralism such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of these painters. Abstract expressionism arose during the war and began to be showcased during the early forties at galleries in New York such as The Art of This Century Gallery. The post-war McCarthy era was a time of artistic censorship in the United States, but if the subject matter were totally abstract art then it would be seen as apolitical, and therefore safe. Or if the art was political, the message was largely for the insiders.Serge Guilbaut. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, University of Chicago Press, 1983.
While the movement is closely associated with painting, Collage Anne Ryan and certain sculptors in particular were also integral to abstract expressionism.Marika Herskovic, Americancan Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) pp12–13 David Smith, and his wife Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, Ibram Lassaw, Theodore Roszak, Phillip Pavia, Mary Callery, Richard Stankiewicz, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson in particular were some of the sculptors considered as being important members of the movement. In addition, the artists David Hare, John Chamberlain, James Rosati, Mark di Suvero, and sculptors Richard Lippold, Raoul Hague, George Rickey, Reuben Nakian, and even Tony Smith, Seymour Lipton, Joseph Cornell, and several othersMarika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists (New York School Press, 2000.) p.11–12 were integral parts of the abstract expressionist movement. Many of the sculptors listed participated in the Ninth Street Show, a famous exhibition curated by Leo Castelli on East Ninth Street in New York City in 1951. Besides the painters and sculptors of the period the New York School of abstract expressionism also generated a number of supportive poets, including Frank O'Hara and photographers such as Aaron Siskind and Fred McDarrah, (whose book The Artist's World in Pictures documented the New York School during the 1950s), and filmmakers—notably Robert Frank—as well.
Although the abstract expressionist school spread quickly throughout the United States, the epicenters of this style were New York City and the San Francisco Bay area of California.
While the New York avant-garde was still relatively unknown by the late 1940s, most of the artists who have become household names today had their well-established patron critics: Clement Greenberg advocated Jackson Pollock and the Color Field painters like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and Hans Hofmann; Harold Rosenberg seemed to prefer the action painters such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, as well as the seminal paintings of Arshile Gorky; Thomas B. Hess, the managing editor of ARTnews, championed Willem de Kooning.
The new critics elevated their protégés by casting other artists as "followers"Thomas B. Hess, "Willem de Kooning", George Braziller, Inc. New York, 1959 p.13 or ignoring those who did not serve their promotional goal.
In 1958, Mark Tobey became the first American painter since Whistler (1895) to win top prize at the Venice Biennale.Tomkins, Calvin. Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg Deckle Paperback, p. 5. Publisher: Picador; Revised and Updated edition (November 29, 2005)
Barnett Newman, a late member of the Uptown Group, wrote catalogue forewords and reviews, and by the late 1940s became an exhibiting artist at Betty Parsons Gallery. His first solo show was in 1948. Soon after his first exhibition, Barnett Newman remarked in one of the Artists' Sessions at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image." Barnett Newman Selected Writings and Interviews, (ed.) by John P. O'Neill, pp. 240–241, University of California Press, 1990 Utilizing his writing skills, Newman fought every step of the way to reinforce his newly established image as an artist and to promote his work. An example is his letter on April 9, 1955, "Letter to Sidney Janis: — 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." Barnett Newman Selected Writings Interviews, p. 201.
Strangely, the person thought to have had most to do with the promotion of this style was a New York Trotskyist: Clement Greenberg. As long-time art critic for the Partisan Review and The Nation, he became an early and literate proponent of abstract expressionism. The well-heeled artist Robert Motherwell joined Greenberg in promoting a style that fit the political climate and the intellectual rebelliousness of the era.
Greenberg proclaimed abstract expressionism and Pollock in particular as the epitome of aesthetic value. He supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds as simply the best painting of its day and the culmination of an art tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Monet, in which painting became ever-'purer' and more concentrated in what was 'essential' to it, the making of marks on a flat surface.Clement Greenberg, "Art and Culture Critical essays", ("The Crisis of the Easel Picture"), Beacon Press, 1961 pp.: 154–57
Pollock's work has always polarised critics. Rosenberg spoke of the transformation of painting into an existential drama in Pollock's work, in which "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event". "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."Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, Chapter 2, "The American Action Painter", pp.23–39
One of the most vocal critics of abstract expressionism at the time was The New York Times art critic John Canaday. Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg along with Greenberg and Rosenberg were important art historians of the post-war era who voiced support for abstract expressionism. During the early-to-mid-sixties younger art critics Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and Robert Hughes added considerable insights into the critical dialectic that continues to grow around abstract expressionism.
The post-war period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval, with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris, formerly the center of European culture and capital of the art world, the climate for art was a disaster, and New York replaced Paris as the new center of the art world. Post-war Europe saw the continuation of Surrealism, Cubism, Dada, and the works of Matisse. Also in Europe, Outsider art,Jean Dubuffet: L’Art brut préféré aux arts culturels 1949(=engl in: Art brut. Madness and Marginalia, special issue of Art & Text, No. 27, 1987, p. 31–33) and Lyrical Abstraction or Tachisme (the European equivalent to abstract expressionism) took hold of the newest generation. Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël, Georges Mathieu, Vieira da Silva, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Pierre Soulages and Jean Messagier, among others are considered important figures in post-war European painting. In the United States, a new generation of American artists began to emerge and to dominate the world stage, and they were called abstract expressionists.
The other abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Pollock, de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos, and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. The radical Anti-Formalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, Conceptual art, and the feminist art movement can be traced to the innovations of abstract expressionism. Rereadings into abstract art, done by art historians such as Linda Nochlin,Nochlin, Linda, Ch.1 in: Women Artists at the Millennium (edited by C. Armstrong and C. de Zegher) MIT Press, 2006. Griselda PollockPollock, Griselda, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Routledge, 2007. and Catherine de ZegherDe Zegher, Catherine, and Teicher, Hendel (eds.), 3 X Abstraction. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005. critically shows, however, that pioneer women artists who have produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by the official accounts of its history, but finally began to achieve long overdue recognition in the wake of the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Abstract expressionism emerged as a major art movement in New York City during the 1950s and thereafter several leading art galleries began to include the abstract expressionists in exhibitions and as regulars in their rosters. Some of those prominent 'uptown' galleries included: the Charles Egan Gallery, the Sidney Janis, the Betty Parsons Gallery, the Kootz Gallery, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Stable Gallery, the Leo Castelli as well as others; and several downtown galleries known at the time as the Tenth Street galleries exhibited many emerging younger artists working in the abstract expressionist vein.
The term was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 and signaled a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of New York School painters and critics. According to Rosenberg the canvas was "an arena in which to act". While abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena within which to come to terms with the act of creation, earlier critics sympathetic to their cause, like Clement Greenberg, focused on their works' "objectness". To Greenberg, it was the physicality of the paintings' clotted and oil-caked surfaces that was the key to understanding them as documents of the artists' Existentialism struggle.
Rosenberg's critique shifted the emphasis from the object to the struggle itself, with the finished painting being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art, which was in the act or process of the painting's creation. This spontaneous activity was the "action" of the painter, through arm and wrist movement, painterly gestures, brushstrokes, thrown paint, splashed, stained, scumbled and dripped. The painter would sometimes let the paint drip onto the canvas, while rhythmically dancing, or even standing in the canvas, sometimes letting the paint fall according to the subconscious mind, thus letting the Unconscious mind part of the psyche assert and express itself. All this, however, is difficult to explain or interpret because it is a supposed unconscious manifestation of the act of pure creation.based (very) loosely on a lecture by Fred Orton at the Uni of Leeds and H. Geldzahler, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, NY 1969
In practice, the term abstract expressionism is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even applied to work which is not especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic , with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to De Kooning's violent and grotesque Women series. Woman V is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between 1950 and 1953 that depict a three-quarter-length female figure. He began the first of these paintings, Woman I, in June 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, when the painting was abandoned unfinished. The art historian Meyer Schapiro saw the painting in de Kooning's studio soon afterwards and encouraged the artist to persist. De Kooning's response was to begin three other paintings on the same theme; Woman II, Woman III and Woman IV. During the summer of 1952, spent at East Hampton, de Kooning further explored the theme through drawings and pastels. He may have finished work on Woman I by the end of June, or possibly as late as November 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time. The Woman series are decidedly Figurative art.
Another important artist is Franz Kline. As with Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, Kline was labelled an "Action Painting" because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brushstrokes and use of canvas; as demonstrated by his painting Number 2 (1954). Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 71–72,
Automatic writing was an important vehicle for action painters such as Kline (in his black and white paintings), Pollock, Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly, who used gesture, surface, and line to create calligraphic, linear symbols and skeins that resemble language, and resonate as powerful manifestations from the Collective unconscious. Robert Motherwell in his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series painted powerful black and white paintings using gesture, surface and symbol evoking powerful emotional charges.
Meanwhile, other action painters, notably de Kooning, Gorky, Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, and James Brooks, used imagery via either abstract landscape or as expressionistic visions of the figure to articulate their highly personal and powerful evocations. James Brooks' paintings were particularly poetic and highly prescient in relationship to Lyrical Abstraction that became prominent in the late 1960s and the 1970s.The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyrical Abstraction, exhibition: April 5 through June 7, 1970, Statement of the exhibition
Color Field painting initially referred to a particular type of abstract expressionism, especially the work of Rothko, Still, Newman, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt and several series of paintings by Joan Miró. Greenberg perceived Color Field painting as related to but different from Action painting. The Color Field painters sought to rid their art of superfluous rhetoric. Artists like Motherwell, Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, Mark Tobey, and especially Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, whose masterpiece Vir heroicus sublimis is in the collection of MoMA, used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general, these artists eliminated recognizable imagery, in the case of Rothko and Gottlieb sometimes using symbols and signs as a replacement of imagery. Certain artists quoted references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. In pursuing this direction of modern art, artists wanted to present each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image.
In distinction to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks of abstract expressionists such as Pollock and de Kooning, the Color Field painters initially appeared to be cool and austere, effacing the individual mark in favor of large, flat areas of color, which these artists considered to be the essential nature of visual abstraction, along with the actual shape of the canvas, which later in the 1960s Frank Stella in particular achieved in unusual ways with combinations of curved and straight edges. However, Color Field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive albeit in a different way from gestural abstract expressionism.
Although abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially in the New York School, and the San Francisco Bay area. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, an "all-over" approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges). The canvas as the arena became a credo of Action painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the Color field painters. Younger artists began exhibiting their abstract expressionist related paintings during the 1950s as well including Alfred Leslie, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, Milton Resnick, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, Friedel Dzubas, and Robert Goodnough among others.
Although Pollock is closely associated with Action Painting because of his style, technique, and his painterly touch and his physical application of paint, art critics have likened Pollock to both Action painting and color field painting. Another critical view advanced by Greenberg connects Pollock's allover canvasses to the large-scale Water Lilies of Claude Monet done during the 1920s. Art critics such as Michael Fried, Greenberg and others have observed that the overall feeling in Pollock's most famous works – his drip paintings – read as vast fields of built-up linear elements. They note that these works often read as vast complexes of similarly-valued paint skeins and all-over fields of color and drawing, and are related to the mural-sized Monets which are similarly constructed of close-valued brushed and scumbled marks that also read as fields of color and drawing. Pollock's use of all-over composition lend a philosophical and a physical connection to the way the color field painters like Newman, Rothko and Still construct their unbroken and in Still's case broken surfaces. In several paintings that Pollock painted after his classic drip painting period of 1947–1950, he used the technique of staining fluid oil paint and house paint into raw canvas. During 1951 he produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings, and in 1952 he produced stain paintings using color. In his November 1952 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City Pollock showed Number 12, 1952, a large, masterful stain painting that resembles a brightly colored stained landscape (with an overlay of broadly dripped dark paint); the painting was acquired from the exhibition by Nelson Rockefeller for his personal collection. Pollock #12 1952 at NY State Mall project Retrieved May 6, 2011
While Arshile Gorky is considered to be one of the founding fathers of abstract expressionism and a surrealist, he was also one of the first painters of the New York School who used the technique of staining. Gorky created broad fields of vivid, open, unbroken color that he used in many of his paintings as grounds. In Gorky's most effective and accomplished paintings between the years 1941–1948, he consistently used intense stained fields of color, often letting the paint run and drip, under and around his familiar lexicon of organic and biomorphic shapes and delicate lines. Another abstract expressionist whose works in the 1940s call to mind the stain paintings of the 1960s and the 1970s is James Brooks. Brooks regularly used stain as a technique in his paintings from the late 1940s. Brooks began diluting his oil paint in order to have fluid colors with which to pour and drip and stain into the mostly raw canvas that he used. These works often combined calligraphy and abstract shapes. During the final three decades of his career, Sam Francis' style of large-scale bright abstract expressionism was closely associated with Color field painting. His paintings straddled both camps within the abstract expressionist rubric, Action painting and Color Field painting.
Having seen Pollock's 1951 paintings of thinned black oil paint stained into raw canvas, Frankenthaler began to produce stain paintings in varied oil colors on raw canvas in 1952. Her most famous painting from that period is Mountains and Sea. She is one of the originators of the Color Field movement that emerged in the late 1950s. 'Color Field' Artists Found a Different Way Retrieved August 3, 2010 Frankenthaler also studied with Hans Hofmann.
Hofmann's paintings are a symphony of color as seen in The Gate, 1959–1960. He was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the US. Hofmann, who came to the United States from Germany in the early 1930s, brought with him the legacy of Modernism. As a young artist in pre-First World War Paris, Hofmann worked with Robert Delaunay, and he knew firsthand the innovative work of both Picasso and Matisse. Matisse's work had an enormous influence on him, and on his understanding of the expressive language of color and the potentiality of abstraction. Hofmann was one of the first theorists of color field painting, and his theories were influential to artists and to critics, particularly to Clement Greenberg, as well as to others during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both profoundly influenced by Helen Frankenthaler's stain paintings after visiting her studio in New York City. Returning to Washington, DC., they began to produce the major works that created the color field movement in the late 1950s.Fenton, Terry. " Morris Louis". sharecom.ca. Retrieved December 8, 2008
In 1972 then Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler said:
Against this revisionist tradition, an essay by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, called Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics and the Cold War, asserts that much of that information concerning what was happening on the American art scene during the 1940s and 50s, as well as the revisionists' interpretation of it, is false or decontextualized. (2025). 9780415228664, Psychology Press. ISBN 9780415228664 Other books on the subject include Art in the Cold War, by Christine Lindey, which also describes the art of the Soviet Union at the same time, and Pollock and After, edited by Francis Frascina, which reprinted the Kimmelman article.
However, many painters, such as Jules Olitski, Joan Mitchell and Antoni TÃ pies continued to work in the abstract expressionist style for many years, extending and expanding its visual and philosophical implications, as many abstract artists continue to do today, in styles described as lyrical abstraction, neo-expressionist and others.
In the years after World War II, a group of New York artists started one of the first true schools of artists in America, bringing about a new era in American artwork: abstract expressionism. This led to the American art boom that brought about styles such as Pop Art. This also helped to make New York into a cultural and artistic hub.
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