Abstract Art is a broad movement in American painting that was first seen during the late 1940s and turned into a common trend in Western painting during the 50s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others were Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. Several of these artists worked, lived, or exhibited their work in New York City.
Despite the fact that it is the common designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the proper category of the type of art created by those artists. Indeed, the movement was made up of lots of different painterly styles that differentiated in both technical application and quality of application. Despite this variation, Abstract Expressionist paintings share several wider elements. They are essentially abstract - in effect, they depict forms which were not assumed from the real world.
They furthermore display limitless, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they display wide freedom of technique and methodology to create this result, with particular emphasis aimed on the manipulation of the malleable physical characteristic of paint to evoke expressive qualities (for example, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They show likewise emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive use of paint in a method of psychic improvisation in the trend of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the likewise intent of displaying the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display the conscious rejection of regularly structured composition formed with discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a unique and unified, unchanged grounds, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Lastly, the paintings fill large canvases to allow these aforementioned visual aspects both monumentality and engrossing strength.
The leading Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted esoteric biomorphic figures by using a free, intricately linear and liquid paint method; and Hans Hofmann, who created dynamic and fully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally constructed paintings. Another significant influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the Western shores in the late 30s and early 40s of a whole host of Surrealists and other such European avant-garde artists migrating from the rise of the Nazis in Europe. Those artists forcefully influenced the native New York City painters and privileged for them a more intimate understanding of the vanguard of European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is usually regarded as having started with the pieces style by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 40s and early 50s.
Without disregarding the diversity of styles of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be distinguished. First was action painting which is recognised by a loose, speedy, dynamic, or strong handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in applications somewhat dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling paint openly onto the canvas. Pollock initially practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints on a raw canvas building up multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into stimulating and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning utilised very vigorous and expressive brushstrokes building up richly coloured and textured images. Kline employed mighty, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas to build up starkly monumental forms.
The following field with Abstract Expressionism is demonstrated by many varied styles beginning with the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes found in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic works of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The last and least emotionally expressive field was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large areas or fields of flat colour and thin diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative effects. The premier colour-field painter was Rothko; the majority of his paintings consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to glimmer and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism created a wide impact on both the American and European art trends through the 50s. Indeed, the movement initiated the shift of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City during the postwar era. Through the time of the fifties, the the movement’s younger artists increasingly took the style of the colour-field painters. By 1960, its participants had mostly shifted away from the high expressiveness of the action painters.
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