Abstract Art is a modern movement in American painting that was instigated around the late 40s and then become a dominating trend in Western painting during the 50s. The premier American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Contemporaries 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. Most of these worked, lived, or had exhibitions in New York City.
Though it is the accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not an apt name of the body of art created by the aforementioned artists. In actual fact, the movement was made up of various different painterly styles that were different in both skill and quality of expression. Despite this variation, Abstract Expressionist paintings possess a number of broad traits. They are essentially abstract – in effect, they display forms which were not drawn from the visible world.
They furthermore display unrestricted, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exhibit considerable freedom of technical skill and application to attain this outcome, with particular emphasis laid on the manipulation of the malleable physical character of paint to create expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They exhibit the same emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of the paint in a type of psychological improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with the same purpose of finding the strength of the creative subconcious in art. They demonstrate the neglect of normally structured composition created by use of discrete and segregable aspects and their replacement with a single unified, unvaried grounds, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Lastly, the paintings fill sizeable canvases to grant those aforementioned visual aspects both monumentality and engrossing power.
The premier Abstract Expressionists had two original forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic images in a free, delicately linear and liquid paint application; and Hans Hofmann, who used dynamic and fully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally constructed works. An early and key influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the American shores in the late 30s and early 40s of a group of Surrealists and the European avant-garde artists coming from the Nazis in Europe. Those artists greatly moved the native New York City painters and permitted them an intimate insight of the vanguard of European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is now viewed as having been initiated with the artworks done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s.
With regard to the diversity of techniques of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be distinguished. The first was action painting which is signified by a loose, speedy, dynamic, or violent handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in applications somewhat dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock initially practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto the raw canvas to build up multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into thrilling and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to create richly coloured and textured images. Kline used mighty, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas to build starkly monumental forms.
The next approach of Abstract Expressionism is displayed by a number of varied styles starting from the highly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes seen in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the visibly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic art of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The remaining and least emotionally expressive field was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large spaces or dimensions of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative effects. The outstanding colour-field painter was Rothko; the majority of his artworks consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to glimmer and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism made a important impact on both the American and European art styles throughout the fifties. Indeed, the movement sparked the change of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City during the postwar decades. During the time of the 50s, the the young artists of the movement increasingly came under the direction of the colour-field painters. By the 60s, those younger participants had largely moved away from the extreme expressiveness of the action painters.
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