Abstract Expressionism

(Late 1940's - early 1960's)

   Abstract expressionism was an specifically American post-World War II art movement. It was the
first American movement to achieve worldwide influence and also the one that put New York City
at the center of the art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.

   After WWII, with images of the Holocaust everywhere, it seemed redundant for socially-aware
artists to paint these same images ... a photograph at the time was much more powerful. Artists
began to explore color and shape and to paint an entire canvas orange or blue.

   These works were produced in an extremely specific geographical setting and revealed a specific
attitude. It was the result of the rivalry and dialogue between young American artists and the
large community of European artists living in exile in New York. Additionally, it has an image of
being rebellious, anarchic, and highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. It is seen as
combining the emotional intensity and self-expression of the German Expressionists with the
anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and
Synthetic Cubism. The movement describe formal trend in American abstraction at the time. It
can be broadly divided into two groups: Action Painting and Color Field and Hard-Edge Painting. It
has its non-American parallels with similar aims (Art Informel, Cobra, Lyrical Abstraction).

   By the 1960s, the movement had lost most of its impact, and was no longer so influential.
Movements which were direct responses to, and rebellions against, abstract expressionism had
begun, such as pop art and minimalism. However, many painters who had produced abstract
expressionist work continued to work in that style for many years afterwards.
 Main Representatives
Action Painters:
•Jackson Pollock
•Willem de-Kooning
•Franz Kline

Color Field and Hard-Edge Painters:

•Helen Frankenthaler
•Barnett NewmanMark
• RothkoEllsworh
• KellyMorris
•LouisAgnes
•MartinKenneth
•NolandJules Olitski
 Style
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, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate
the "all-over" look of Pollock's drip paintings.
The movement's 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. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly
idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic.[2] 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. Pollock's energetic "action paintings", with their "busy" feel, are different, both technically
and aesthetically, from the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning's figurative paintings)
and the rectangles of color in Mark Rothko's Color Field paintings (which are not what would usually be
called expressionist and which Rothko denied were abstract). Yet all three artists are classified as abstract
expressionists.
Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early twentieth 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 like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Emma Kunz, and
later on Rothko, Barnett Newman, John McLaughlin, and Agnes Martin, abstract art clearly implied
expression of ideas concerning the spiritual, the unconscious and the mind.
Two Streams of Abstract Expressionism

I. ACTION PAINTING

II . Color Field and Hard-Edge

Painting
I. ACTION PAINTING

Action Painting(late 1940's - late 1950's)

   One of the significant streams of Abstract Expressionism is the Action
Painting. The term "Action Painting" was used for the first time in 1952 to
describe the works of painters such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem
de Kooning. The life energy and the psyche of the painter were at once the
driving force, the resource and the meaning of these works. The canvas was
seen as an arena. Painting became an irrational, instinctive and impulsive
moment of existence. The Action Painting work thus turned into the form and
trace of the living body, conveying split-second action and motion.
 Paul Jackson Pollock
(January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956)
was an influential American painter and a major figure in the
abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock
enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a
mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, sometimes
struggling with alcoholism. In 1945, he married the artist Lee
Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and
on his legacy.
Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related car accident.
In December 1956, he was given a memorial retrospective
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York
City, and a larger more comprehensive exhibition there in 1967.
More recently, in 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with
large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate
in London.
 IMAGE OF #1
, 1950 in the National Gallery of Art.
 NUMBER 5,
(1948)
By :
Jackson Pollock,

oil on fiberboard,
244 x 122 cm.
(96 x 48 in.),
private collection.
 Number 8
By : Jason Pollock
Pedestal Table in the Studio

ANDRÉ-AIMÉ-RENÉ MASSON  Automatic drawing

(4 January 1896 – 28 October 1987)
was a French artist.
 Willem de Kooning
(April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997)

was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was

born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came
to be referred to as Abstract expressionism or Action painting, and
was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New
York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock,
Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph
Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston and Clyfford Still.
 Woman III Woman V
Willem de Kooning 
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) 1952-53
II. Color Field and Hard-Edge Painting

Color Field and Hard-Edge Painting (early 1960's)

   Another significant stream of Abstract Expressionism is the Color Field and Hard-Edge
Painting. The terms Color Field and Hard Edge describe two formal trends in American
abstraction in the early 1960's. Color Field works consist of large colored areas; neither
signs nor forms existed for the eye to latch on to. Color was used without any perspective
device, producing a sensation of impressive size. The shades of color were usually diluted
so as to sink into the canvas.
   The expression Hard Edge appeared in the late 1950's to describe geometric abstract
works, which emphasized colorful atmospheres and imprecise shapes. Hard Edge works
were typified by their clearly defined outlines and edges and the precision and clarity of
the compositions. 
 HELEN FRANKENTHALER 
(born December 12, 1928)
is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to
the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six
decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while
continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. [1] She began
exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary
museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 
Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that
introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known
as Color Field. Born in New York City, she was influenced by Hans Hofmann, 
Jackson Pollock's paintings and by Clement Greenberg. Her work has been
the subject of several retrospective exhibitions; including a 1989
retrospective at theMuseum of Modern Art in New York City. Her work has
been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the
National Medal of Arts
Mountains and Sea (1952)
 by Helen Frankenthaler
 Who's
Afraid of Onement 1
,1948
Red,
Yellow
and
Blue?
1966,

Barnett Newman 
(January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American
artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract
expressionism and one of the foremost of the color
field painters.
 Arshile Gorky
Gorky was born in the village of Khorgom, situated on the shores of Lake Van. It is not known exactly when he was born: it
was sometime between 1902 and 1905. (In later years Gorky was vague about even the date of his birth, changing it from year to
year.) In 1910 his father emigrated to America to avoid the draft, leaving his family behind in the town of Van.
Gorky fled Lake Van in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his three sisters into Russian-
controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky's mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Gorky was reunited with
his father when he arrived in America in 1920, aged 16, but they never grew close. At age 31, Gorky married. He changed his name
to Arshile Gorky, in the process reinventing his identity (he even told people he was a relative of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky).
The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, were often speculated to have been
informed by the suffering and loss of the period.[2] His The Artist and His Mother paintings are based on a childhood photograph
taken in Van in which he is depicted standing beside his mother.
 Legacy….
Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. His work as lyrical abstraction was a "new
language. He "lit the way for two generations of American artists".  The painterly spontaneity of mature works like "The Liver
is the Cock's Comb". "The Betrothal II", and "One Year the Milkweed" immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and
leaders in the New York School have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence.
But his oeuvre is a phenomenal achievement in its own right, synthesizing Surrealism and the sensuous color and
painterliness of the School of Paris with his own highly personal formal vocabulary. His paintings and drawings hang in every
major American museum including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the
Metropolitan and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (which maintains the Gorky Archive), and in many
worldwide, including the Tate in London.
 The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926-1936) by Arshile Gorky.
The painting is based on a photograph of a young Gorky and his mother taken in the short-lived 
first republic of Armenia. His mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919 when Gorky was 15, only 4 years after
Gorky along with his mother and four sisters had escaped the Armenian Genocide from Van
 Portrait of Master Bill,
by Arshile Gorky Date: 1929-36 Oil on canvas
 The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944),
By Arshile Gorky. oil on canvas