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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Abstract expressionism.

Number 28, 1950

Jackson Pollock

The Glazier

Willem de Kooning

No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow)

Mark Rothko

The Flesh Eaters

William Baziotes

Black Reflections

Franz Kline

Clyfford Still

Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental

Richard Pousette-Dart

David Smith

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70

Robert Motherwell

Black Untitled

Barnett Newman

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Night Creatures

Lee Krasner

Stella Paul Department of Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world’s focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as “Abstract Expressionists” or “The New York School” did, however, share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), William Baziotes (1912–1963), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), and Clyfford Still (1904–1980) advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content. Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches—and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.

Context Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. The Great Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither of which satisfied this group of artists’ desire to find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path.

But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe. The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of Matisse , Léger , and Picasso , among others. Another forum for viewing the most advanced art was Albert Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, which was housed at New York University from 1927 to 1943. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky, and others. The forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—opened in 1939. Even prior to that date, its collection of Kandinskys had been publicly exhibited several times. The lessons of European modernism were also disseminated through teaching. The German expatriate Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) became the most influential teacher of modern art in the United States, and his impact reached both artists and critics.

The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man’s dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Direct contact with European artists increased as a result of World War II, which caused so many—including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Breton, Mondrian, and Léger—to seek refuge in the U.S. The Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on tapping the unconscious. One Surrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein.

Early Work Early on, the Abstract Expressionists, in seeking a timeless and powerful subject matter, turned to primitive myth and archaic art for inspiration. Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Newman, and Baziotes all looked to ancient or primitive cultures for expression. Their early works feature pictographic and biomorphic elements transformed into personal code. Jungian psychology was compelling, too, in its assertion of the collective unconscious. Directness of expression was paramount, best achieved through lack of premeditation. In a famous letter to the New York Times (June 1943), Gottlieb and Rothko, with the assistance of Newman, wrote: “To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical.”

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Gesture In 1947, Pollock developed a radical new technique, pouring and dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (instead of traditional methods of painting in which pigment is applied by brush to primed, stretched canvas positioned on an easel). The paintings were entirely nonobjective. In their subject matter (or seeming lack of one), scale (huge), and technique (no brush, no stretcher bars, no easel), the works were shocking to many viewers. De Kooning, too, was developing his own version of a highly charged, gestural style, alternating between abstract work and powerful iconic figurative images. Other colleagues, including Krasner and Kline, were equally engaged in creating an art of dynamic gesture in which every inch of a picture is fully charged. For Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lay in its directness and immediacy of expression. A painting is meant to be a revelation of the artist’s authentic identity. The gesture, the artist’s “signature,” is evidence of the actual process of the work’s creation. It is in reference to this aspect of the work that critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” in 1952: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Color Field Another path lay in the expressive potential of color. Rothko, Newman, and Still, for instance, created art based on simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields. The impulse was, in general, reflective and cerebral, with pictorial means simplified in order to create a kind of elemental impact. Rothko and Newman, among others, spoke of a goal to achieve the “sublime” rather than the “beautiful,” harkening back to Edmund Burke in a drive for the grand, heroic vision in opposition to a calming or comforting effect. Newman described his reductivism as one means of “freeing ourselves of the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend … freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting.” For Rothko, his glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent color should provoke in viewers a quasi-religious experience, even eliciting tears. As with Pollock and the others, scale contributed to the meaning. For the time, the works were vast in scale. And they were meant to be seen in relatively close environments, so that the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work. Rothko said, “I paint big to be intimate.” The notion is toward the personal (authentic expression of the individual) rather than the grandiose.

The Aftermath The first generation of Abstract Expressionism flourished between 1943 and the mid-1950s. The movement effectively shifted the art world’s focus from Europe (specifically Paris) to New York in the postwar years. The paintings were seen widely in traveling exhibitions and through publications. In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, new generations of artists—both American and European—were profoundly marked by the breakthroughs made by the first generation, and went on to create their own important expressions based on, but not imitative of, those who forged the way.

Paul, Stella. “Abstract Expressionism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abex/hd_abex.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Messinger, Lisa Mintz Abstract Expressionism: Works on Paper. Selections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art . New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. See on MetPublications

Thaw, Eugene Victor "The Abstract Expressionist." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin , v. 44, no. 3 (Winter, 1986–87). See on MetPublications

Tinterow, Gary, Lisa Mintz Messinger, and Nan Rosenthal, eds. Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art . New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007. See on MetPublications

Additional Essays by Stella Paul

• Paul, Stella. “ Modern Storytellers: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold .” (October 2004)

Related Essays

• Fernand Léger (1881–1955)
• Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
• Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
• School of Paris
• African Influences in Modern Art
• Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986)
• Jasper Johns (born 1930)
• Modern Storytellers: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold
• Paul Klee (1879–1940)
• The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present
• 20th Century A.D.
• Abstract Art
• Action Painting / Gestural Painting
• Beat Movement
• Color Field
• Modern and Contemporary Art
• North America
• Nouveau Realisme
• Oil on Canvas
• Regionalism
• Sculpture in the Round
• Stainless Steel
• Tachism / Art Informel / Lyrical Abstraction
• United States

Artist or Maker

• Albers, Josef
• Baziotes, William
• Booth, Peter
• De Kooning, Willem
• Gorky, Arshile
• Kline, Franz
• Krasner, Lee
• Motherwell, Robert
• Newman, Barnett
• Pollock, Jackson
• Pousette-Dart, Richard
• Rothko, Mark
• Smith, David
• Still, Clyfford

Online Features

• 82nd & Fifth: “Deciphering the Flowers” by Sheena Wagstaff
• 82nd & Fifth: “Gesture” by Nicholas Cullinan
• The Artist Project: “Mark Bradford on Clyfford Still”
• The Artist Project: “Robert Longo on Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) “
• The Artist Project: “Wenda Gu on Robert Motherwell’s Lyric Suite “

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The Rigors of Freedom: The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism

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The Intersection of Abstract Expressionist and Mass Visual Culture

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A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752). This special issue belongs to the section " Visual Arts ".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (21 November 2022) | Viewed by 18774

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Dear Colleagues,

Beginning with Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” abstract expressionist art was traditionally viewed as a purist movement that was antithetical to the populist imagery and subject matter associated with the burgeoning mass visual culture of the 1940s and 1950s. However, revisionist scholarship on abstract expressionism has increasingly revealed its complex relationship with a variety of commercial media, including glossy picture magazines, wartime news reports, propaganda posters, comics and popular movies, particularly film noir.

We seek articles that engage with new topical and theoretical approaches for considering the mass cultural context of abstract expressionism. All aspects and varieties of painting, sculpture, drawing and collage can be addressed, and we especially welcome topics that expand the field of abstract expressionist studies with regard to issues of globalism, race and gender. Articles can examine both the intentional and subliminal responses of artists to the media spectacle associated with World War II, which included censored war imagery, newsreels, military propaganda and patriotic home front advertising. We also wish to address the social experiences and psychic trauma related to the war years that continued to pervade postwar visual culture. In addition, a compelling topic is the shifting symbiotic relationship between popular media and abstract expressionist art, which was appropriated for mainstream consumption in advertising, fashion magazines and film design.

To propose an article for publication, please send a title and a short abstract to the Editor, Gregory Gilbert, at [email protected] , with a copy to [email protected] by 1 May 2022. Full manuscripts of up to max 15,000 words in length should be submitted by 21 November 2022.

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

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Abstract expressionism

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Film studies have been conventionally paired with literature or studies of the dramatic arts. Film, however, is an incredibly visual medium. The filmmaker encodes their frame with visual content, as does the painter with their canvas. Since antiquity visual rhetoricians have discussed the significance of images and art, and there have been many contributions to the existential debate of where the medium of film situates itself in the arts. This research aims to contribute to the overarching question of how, and to what extent fine art has influenced the development of film, focussing specifically on the pioneer of the Baroque movement, the infamous painter Caravaggio, and his Baroque aesthetic associated with German Expressionist films of the Weimar era. Therefore, a literary review of aesthetics and art theory is established, as well as the trajectory and style of the artist Caravaggio. This research also defines the components of cinematic mise-en-scène, of which is analysed in a case study. The case study itself presents a textual analysis of the German Expressionist films Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927) utilizing the framework of Panofsky’s iconographic analysis, thereby not only treating the film as a text to be analysed, but also as an art image to be decoded. This particular mode of enquiry allows this research to thoroughly answer the research question of ‘how does the Caravaggesque Baroque fine art aesthetics, applied to the cinematic mise-en-scène, contribute to the developments of the visual style of the post-war Expressionist cinema?’

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Home > STUDENTS > THESES > 3375

Masters Theses

Surrealism and abstract expressionism.

Michael R. Robins , Eastern Illinois University

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Master of Arts (MA)

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Ben P. Watkins

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Robins, Michael R., "Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism" (1976). Masters Theses . 3375. https://thekeep.eiu.edu/theses/3375

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Abstract Expressionism

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Abstract Expressionism , broad movement in American painting that began in the late 1940s and became a dominant trend in Western painting during the 1950s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock , Willem de Kooning , Franz Kline , and Mark Rothko . Others included Joan Mitchell , 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 artists worked, lived, or exhibited in New York City .

Although it is the accepted designation , Abstract Expressionism is not an accurate description of the body of work created by these artists. Indeed, the movement comprised many different painterly styles varying in both technique and quality of expression. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings share several broad characteristics. They often use degrees of abstraction; i.e., they depict forms unrealistically or, at the extreme end, forms not drawn from the visible world (nonobjective). They emphasize free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exercise considerable freedom of technique and execution to attain this goal, with a particular emphasis laid on the exploitation of the variable physical character of paint to evoke expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They show similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of that paint in a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists , with a similar intent of expressing the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display the abandonment of conventionally structured composition built up out of discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. And finally, the paintings fill large canvases to give these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing power.

The early Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky , who painted suggestive biomorphic shapes using a free, delicately linear, and liquid paint application; and Hans Hofmann , who used dynamic and strongly textured brushwork in abstract but conventionally composed works. Another important influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on American shores in the late 1930s and early ’40s of a host of Surrealists and other important European avant-garde artists who were fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe. Such artists greatly stimulated the native New York City painters and gave them a more intimate view of the vanguard of European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally regarded as having begun with the paintings done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 1940s and early ’50s.

In spite of the diversity of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general approaches can be distinguished. One, Action painting , is characterized by a loose, rapid, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes and in techniques partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas . Pollock first practiced Action painting by dripping commercial paints on raw canvas to build up complex and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline used powerful, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas to create starkly monumental forms.

The middle ground within Abstract Expressionism is represented by several varied styles, ranging from the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic pictures of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The third and least emotionally expressive approach was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large areas, or fields, of flat colour and thin, diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative effects. The outstanding colour-field painter was Rothko, most of whose works consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to shimmer and resonate .

Abstract Expressionism had a great impact on both the American and European art scenes during the 1950s. Indeed, the movement marked the shift of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar decades. In the course of the 1950s, the movement’s younger followers increasingly followed the lead of the colour-field painters and, by 1960, its participants had generally drifted away from the highly charged expressiveness of the Action painters.

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