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Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
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Abstract expressionism
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Years activeLate 1940s–early 1960s
LocationUnited States, specifically New York City
Major figuresClyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, Hans Hofmann, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning
InfluencesModernism, Expressionism (Wassily Kandinsky), Surrealism, Cubism, Dada

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 muralists.[1][2] 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 Surrealist 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 Synthetic 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 painters. 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.[3] 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.[4] The term was used in the United States in 1946 by Robert Coates in his review of 18 Hans Hofmann paintings.[5][6]

Style

[edit]

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. The newer research tends to put the exile-surrealist Wolfgang Paalen in the position of the artist and theoretician who fostered the theory of the viewer-dependent possibility space through his paintings and his magazine DYN. Paalen considered ideas of quantum mechanics, as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of the totemic vision and the spatial structure of native-Indian painting from British Columbia and prepared the ground for the new spatial vision of the young American abstracts. His long essay Totem Art (1943) had considerable influence on such artists as Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.[7] Around 1944 Barnett Newman tried to explain America's newest art movement and included a list of "the men in the new movement". Paalen is mentioned twice; other artists mentioned are Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Hofmann, Baziotes, Gorky and others. Robert Motherwell is mentioned with a question mark.[8] 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.[9] 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 "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 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.[10]

David Smith, 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 muralists 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 then it would be seen as apolitical, and therefore safe. Or if the art was political, the message was largely for the insiders.[11]

While the movement is closely associated with painting, collagist Anne Ryan and certain sculptors in particular were also integral to abstract expressionism.[12] 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 others[13] were integral parts of the abstract expressionist movement. Many of the sculptors listed participated in the Ninth Street Show,[13] 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.

Art critics of the post–World War II era

[edit]

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

— Harold Rosenberg[14]

In the 1940s there were not only few galleries (The Art of This Century, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Julien Levy Gallery and a few others) but also few critics who were willing to follow the work of the New York Vanguard. There were also a few artists with a literary background, among them Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman, who functioned as critics as well.

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"[15] 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.[16]

Barnett Newman, Onement 1, 1948. During the 1940s Barnett Newman wrote several articles about the new American painting.

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."[17] 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."[18]

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.[19]

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."[20]

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.

History

[edit]

World War II and the Post-War period

[edit]
Richard Pousette-Dart, Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, 1941–42

During the period leading up to and during World War II, modernist artists, writers, and poets, as well as important collectors and dealers, fled Europe and the onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. Many of those who didn't flee perished. Among the artists and collectors who arrived in New York during the war (some with help from Varian Fry) were Hans Namuth, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, Max Ernst, Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, Leo Castelli, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, Roberto Matta, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Fernand Léger, and Piet Mondrian. A few artists, notably Picasso, Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard remained in France and survived.

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, Art brut,[21] 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.[22] 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.

Gorky, Hofmann, and Graham

[edit]
Arshile Gorky, The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944), oil on canvas, 731⁄4 × 98" (186 × 249 cm) Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on abstract expressionism. De Kooning said: "I met a lot of artists — but then I met Gorky... He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head; remarkable. So I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends."[23]

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Matisse, Picasso, Surrealism, Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early Modernism via eminent educators in the United States, including Hans Hofmann from Germany and John D. Graham from Ukraine. Graham's influence on American art during the early 1940s was particularly visible in the work of Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart among others. Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. His work as lyrical abstraction[24][25][26][27][28] was a "new language.[24] He "lit the way for two generations of American artists".[24] The painterly spontaneity of mature works such as 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. The early work of Hyman Bloom was also influential.[29] American artists also benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors. Hans Hofmann in particular as teacher, mentor, and artist was both important and influential to the development and success of abstract expressionism in the United States. Among Hofmann's protégés was Clement Greenberg, who became an enormously influential voice for American painting, and among his students was Lee Krasner, who introduced her teacher, Hofmann, to her husband, Jackson Pollock.[30]

Pollock and Abstract influences

[edit]

During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all Contemporary art that followed him. To some extent, Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Picasso's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via Cubism and constructed sculpture, with influences as disparate as Navajo sand paintings, surrealism, Jungian analysis, and Mexican mural art,[31] Pollock redefined what it was to produce art. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials; linear skeins of paint dripped and thrown; drawing, staining, brushing; imagery and non-imagery—essentially took art-making beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism in general expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art.

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, 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,[32] Griselda Pollock[33] and Catherine de Zegher[34] 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,[35] the Sidney Janis Gallery,[36] the Betty Parsons Gallery,[37] the Kootz Gallery,[38] the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Stable Gallery, the Leo Castelli Gallery 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.

Action painting

[edit]

Action painting was a style widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, and is closely associated with abstract expressionism (some critics have used the terms action painting and abstract expressionism interchangeably). A comparison is often drawn between the American action painting and the French tachisme.

The term was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952[39] 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' existential struggle.

Boon by James Brooks, 1957, Tate Gallery

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 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.[40]

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 action paintings, 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.[41] The Woman series are decidedly figurative paintings.

Another important artist is Franz Kline.[42][43] As with Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, Kline was labelled an "action painter" 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).[44][45][46]

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.[47][48] 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.[49][50]

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.[51]

Color field

[edit]

Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and the serenely shimmering blocks of color in Mark Rothko's work (which is not what would usually be called expressionist and which Rothko denied was abstract), are classified as abstract expressionists, albeit from what Clement Greenberg termed the Color field direction of abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell can be comfortably described as practitioners of Action painting and Color field painting. In the 1940s Richard Pousette-Dart's tightly constructed imagery often depended upon themes of mythology and mysticism; as did the paintings of Gottlieb, and Pollock in that decade as well.

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.[52] 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.

William Baziotes, Cyclops, 1947, oil on canvas, Chicago Art Institute. Baziotes' abstract expressionist works show the influence of Surrealism

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.[53]

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.[54] 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.[55]

In 1972 then Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler said:

Clement Greenberg included the work of both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in a show that he did at the Kootz Gallery in the early 1950s. Clem was the first to see their potential. He invited them up to New York in 1953, I think it was, to Helen's studio to see a painting that she had just done called Mountains and Sea, a very, very beautiful painting, which was in a sense, out of Pollock and out of Gorky. It also was one of the first stain pictures, one of the first large field pictures in which the stain technique was used, perhaps the first one. Louis and Noland saw the picture unrolled on the floor of her studio and went back to Washington, DC., and worked together for a while, working at the implications of this kind of painting.[56][57]

In the 1960s after abstract expressionism

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Main articles: Post-painterly abstraction, Color Field painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Arte Povera, Process Art, Minimal art, Postminimalism, and Western painting

In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s, several new directions, like the Hard-edge painting exemplified by John McLaughlin, emerged. Meanwhile, as a reaction against the subjectivism of abstract expressionism, other forms of Geometric abstraction began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde circles. Greenberg became the voice of Post-painterly abstraction; by curating an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964. Color field painting, Hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction[58] emerged as radical new directions.

Abstract expressionism and the Cold War

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Since the mid-1970s it has been argued that the style attracted the attention, in the early 1950s, of the CIA, who saw it as representative of the US as a haven of free thought and free markets, as well as a challenge to both the socialist realist styles prevalent in communist nations and the dominance of the European art markets.[59] The book by Frances Stonor Saunders,[citation needed] The Cultural Cold War—The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters,[60] (published in the UK as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War) details how the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists as part of cultural imperialism via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967. Notably Robert Motherwell's series Elegy to the Spanish Republic addressed some of those political issues. Tom Braden, founding chief of the CIA's International Organizations Division (IOD) and ex-executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art said in an interview, "I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."[61]

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.[62] 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.

Consequences

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Mark di Suvero, Aurora, 1992–1993
Jean-Paul Riopelle, 1951, Untitled, oil on canvas, 54 x 64.7 cm (21 1/4 x 25 1/2 in.), private collection

Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923–2002), a member of the Montreal-based surrealist-inspired group Les Automatistes, helped introduce a related style of abstract impressionism to the Parisian art world from 1949. Michel Tapié's groundbreaking book, Un Art Autre (1952), was also enormously influential in this regard. Tapié was also a curator and exhibition organizer who promoted the works of Pollock and Hans Hofmann in Europe. By the 1960s, the movement's initial effect had been assimilated, yet its methods and proponents remained highly influential in art, affecting profoundly the work of many artists who followed. Abstract expressionism preceded Tachisme, Color Field painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Fluxus, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, Neo-expressionism, and the other movements of the sixties and seventies and it influenced all those later movements that evolved. Movements which were direct responses to, and rebellions against abstract expressionism began with Hard-edge painting (Frank Stella, Robert Indiana and others) and Pop artists, notably Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein who achieved prominence in the US, accompanied by Richard Hamilton in Britain. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the US formed a bridge between abstract expressionism and Pop art. Minimalism was exemplified by artists such as Donald Judd, Robert Mangold and Agnes Martin.

However, many painters, such as Jules Olitski, Joan Mitchell and Antoni Tàpies 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.[63]

Abstract Expressionists value the organism over the static whole, becoming over being, expression over perfection, vitality over finish, fluctuation over repose, feeling over formulation, the unknown over the known, the veiled over the clear, the individual over society and the inner over the outer.[64]

— William C. Seitz, American artist and Art historian

Major sculpture

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List of abstract expressionists

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Abstract expressionist artists

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Significant artists whose mature work defined American abstract expressionism:

Other artists

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Significant artists whose mature work relates to the American abstract expressionist movement:

See also

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  • Bluebeard, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a fictional autobiography written by fictional abstract expressionist Rabo Karabekian.
  • Michel Tapié (critic and exhibition organizer important to the dissemination of abstract expressionism in Europe, Japan, and Latin America)

References

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Books

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Bibliography

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Abstract expressionism

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Abstract Expressionism was a stylistically diverse American that emerged in in the early and flourished until the mid-1950s, characterized by radical innovations in technique and subject matter that prioritized the individual artist's psyche, spontaneity, and direct emotional expression over representational forms.
Key characteristics encompassed two primary tendencies: energetic, gestural "" involving improvised brushwork or dripping techniques on large-scale canvases often laid on the floor, and more contemplative "" paintings featuring expansive areas of saturated color to evoke universal themes.
Influenced by European , , and psychological theories such as those of , the movement rejected premeditated composition in favor of process-driven creation, as articulated by artists like , , and : "To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to ."
Prominent figures included , whose 1947 drip technique exemplified physical engagement with the canvas; , known for dynamic abstractions of the female form; , with his luminous color fields; and others such as , , , and .
Abstract Expressionism shifted the epicenter of the from to New York, establishing the "New York School" amid post-war economic recovery and cultural assertiveness, while its non-figurative emphasis symbolized individual liberty during the era of McCarthyism and geopolitical tension.
A defining controversy involves the United States Central Intelligence Agency's covert promotion of the movement through front organizations like the and Museum of Modern Art-led exhibitions, such as The New American Painting (1958–1959), to propagandize American individualism against Soviet , with unwitting artists serving as tools in cultural warfare.

Definition and Core Features

Stylistic Elements and Techniques

Abstract Expressionist paintings typically employed large-scale es, often several feet across, to immerse viewers in non-representational forms derived from the artist's impulses. Key stylistic elements include dynamic, calligraphic lines, amorphous shapes, and vast color expanses that prioritize emotional immediacy over illusionistic depth or content. Artists frequently used unprimed or raw canvas to allow to soak in, enhancing the work's raw, tactile quality, and incorporated commercial enamels alongside traditional oils for varied and drying times. The movement's techniques diverged into gestural abstraction, or action painting, and the more contemplative color field approach. In action painting, the physical process of creation became integral, with artists like Jackson Pollock placing canvases on the floor to enable full-body engagement, applying paint via dripping, flinging, smearing, or sweeping with unconventional tools such as sticks, trowels, or housepainter's brushes. This yielded chaotic yet controlled compositions of interlocking lines and drips, as in Pollock's mural-sized works from 1947 onward, where thinned enamels formed rhythmic, web-like patterns without preliminary sketches. Other practitioners, including Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, emphasized vigorous brushwork—de Kooning's slashing strokes evoking fleshy forms, Kline's bold black-and-white contrasts achieved through broad, rapid applications that simulated spontaneous energy while sometimes involving preparatory drawings. ![Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948, oil on canvas]float-right Color field techniques, by contrast, sought luminous, immaterial surfaces through staining or veiling thinned paints over expansive, unmodulated fields, minimizing visible brushwork to evoke transcendent scale. Barnett Newman's "zip" motif, introduced in Onement I (1948), involved masking tape to delineate a thin vertical cadmium red stripe against a solid magenta ground, applied in precise layers to ensure optical flatness and confrontational simplicity measuring 27¼ × 16¼ inches. This method rejected gestural frenzy for meditative uniformity, influencing later works where Newman used Magna varnish for vibrant, matte color saturation without impasto. Both approaches underscored the canvas as an arena for direct, unmediated expression, often executed in studios like those at 10th Street in New York during the 1940s and 1950s.

Philosophical and Psychological Foundations

Abstract Expressionism's philosophical underpinnings were rooted in existentialist thought, which gained prominence after amid widespread disillusionment from events like and atomic bombings. Artists drew from Jean-Paul Sartre's emphasis on individual freedom and the idea that human actions confer meaning on an otherwise absurd existence, viewing the act of painting as a defiant assertion of personal authenticity against external chaos. This perspective aligned with Harold Rosenberg's 1952 formulation of "," where the canvas served not as a depiction of inner states but as a record of the artist's existential struggle and gesture in the moment. The movement also incorporated influences from earlier modernist philosophies, such as Wassily Kandinsky's theories on art's spiritual dimensions and the psychological effects of color and form, which posited as a means to evoke inner vibrations and universal spiritual experiences. These ideas encouraged artists to prioritize subjective emotional truth over representational fidelity, fostering a rejection of rationalist or illusionistic traditions in favor of direct, intuitive expression that mirrored the fragmented . Psychologically, Abstract Expressionism was shaped by psychoanalytic theories, particularly Sigmund Freud's exploration of the unconscious and repressed drives, which inspired techniques aimed at bypassing conscious control to reveal primal emotions. Carl Jung's concepts of the and archetypes further influenced practitioners, who sought mythic, primordial symbols through spontaneous creation, as seen in the Surrealist-derived automatism adopted by figures like during his Jungian-inspired therapy in the 1930s and 1940s. This dual Freudian-Jungian framework positioned the artwork as a visual manifestation of subconscious turmoil, enabling artists to externalize inner psychological conflicts amid the era's existential anxieties.

Historical Origins and Development

Pre-World War II Influences

The of 1913 marked a pivotal introduction of European modernism to American audiences, exhibiting works by artists such as , , and that exemplified , , and early , challenging prevailing realist traditions and inspiring American painters to explore formal experimentation and non-representational forms. This exposure prompted figures like Stuart Davis and to adapt modernist techniques, laying early groundwork for abstraction in the United States by emphasizing color, structure, and subjective expression over literal depiction. During the interwar decades, institutions amplified these influences: the , founded in 1929, hosted exhibitions including and Abstract Art in 1936 and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism in 1936–1937, presenting works by Matisse, , and Surrealists that familiarized artists with fragmented forms and psychological depth. The Museum of Living Art at (1927–1943) displayed geometric abstractions by and , while the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, opened in 1939, featured Wassily Kandinsky's color-driven works, reinforcing abstraction's viability amid economic hardship. These venues, alongside Alfred Stieglitz's galleries, cultivated a receptive environment for non-objective art, influencing emerging talents to prioritize emotional resonance over narrative. Hans Hofmann, a German expatriate who established schools in New York and California by the mid-1930s, exerted direct pedagogical influence, teaching principles of Cubist structure, Fauvist color, and dynamic "push-pull" spatial tensions to students including and , who later became Abstract Expressionist leaders. His emphasis on improvisational techniques and the integration of European modernism with personal intuition bridged pre-war experimentation and gestural . Surrealism's pre-1940 impact stemmed from New York exhibitions, such as those at the Julien Levy Gallery starting in 1931, which showcased and , introducing psychic automatism and subconscious exploration as tools for bypassing rational control. Though American artists critiqued Surrealism's European-centric politics, they adopted its valorization of the unconscious—evident in Arshile Gorky's early biomorphic forms derived from —fostering a shift toward intuitive, process-oriented painting that anticipated Abstract Expressionism's core tenets. The Works Progress Administration's federal art projects during the (1930s) further enabled this evolution, providing stipends that allowed artists like to refine modernist influences amid social realism's dominance.

Emergence During and After

Abstract Expressionism coalesced in New York during the early 1940s, as the served as a refuge for European modernists fleeing Nazi persecution and devastation, including figures like , , and , whose ideas of automatism and abstraction influenced local artists. This influx, combined with the physical destruction of European cultural centers, positioned New York as an emerging hub for activity by 1943, when the first generation of Abstract Expressionists began producing work characterized by large-scale canvases and emphasis on process over representation. The war's global trauma, including and atomic bombings, prompted American artists to prioritize personal psychological expression and subconscious impulses, drawing from Jungian theory and existential philosophy rather than direct political commentary, as seen in early works like William Baziotes's Cyclops (1947), which evokes mythic introspection amid postwar uncertainty. Jackson Pollock's adoption of drip techniques around 1947 marked a pivotal technical innovation, enabling spontaneous gesture that captured the era's sense of chaos and individual agency. Artists gathered informally at venues like the starting in the mid-1940s, fostering a "New York School" ethos of experimentation independent from European traditions. Postwar, from 1945 onward, the movement accelerated with the U.S.'s ascendance as a , enabling institutional support through galleries like Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century (1942–1947), which exhibited proto-Abstract Expressionist works, and the economic boom that allowed artists to scale up formats and materials. By the late , this synthesis rejected figuration's limitations, prioritizing raw emotional release as a response to industrialized warfare's , though critics like later formalized its theoretical underpinnings in the . The style's emergence thus reflected causal links between geopolitical shifts, émigré influences, and artists' drive for authentic, non-representational forms amid existential reckoning.

Peak in the 1940s and 1950s

The period from the mid- to the mid- marked the culmination of Abstract Expressionism, as New York-based artists produced mature works that emphasized gestural freedom, large-scale canvases, and emotional intensity reflective of postwar existential concerns. This era saw the consolidation of stylistic innovations, with and diverging as primary modes. Jackson Pollock's adoption of the drip technique around 1947 enabled all-over compositions, as in Number 1A, 1948, which rejected traditional easel painting for floor-based pouring and flinging of industrial paints. advanced gestural abstraction through vigorous brushwork in Excavation (1950), his largest canvas to date at 81 by 100 inches, featuring interlocking forms derived from fragmented figures and landscapes. Parallel developments in emerged with Barnett Newman's Onement I (1948), introducing vertical "zips" as structural and metaphysical dividers on vast, unmodulated fields, influencing later . Mark Rothko's multiforms evolved into luminous, edge-blurred rectangles by the early , such as those in his 1950s chapel series prototypes, prioritizing optical immersion over narrative. These innovations were supported by galleries like , which hosted solo shows for Newman in 1950 and Rothko in 1947, fostering a network of mutual exhibitions among roughly 15-20 core practitioners. Key exhibitions amplified visibility: Pollock's works appeared in Whitney Annuals from 1946 and the 1950 Venice Biennale, while de Kooning's Excavation was shown at the latter, signaling American art's international ascent. The 9th Street Show, held May 21 to June 10, 1951, in a Greenwich Village storefront, featured over 140 works by 70 artists including Pollock, de Kooning, and newcomers like Joan Mitchell, drawing critics and marking a defiant assertion of independence from uptown establishments. A 1949 Life magazine feature on Pollock, questioning if he was "the greatest living painter in the United States," propelled public and market interest, with his paintings fetching up to $8,000 by 1950—unprecedented for contemporaries. By mid-decade, institutional acquisitions, such as MoMA's purchase of Pollock's Number 28, 1950, underscored the movement's dominance, though internal stylistic exhaustion began surfacing by 1955.

Transition and Decline in the 1960s

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Abstract Expressionism's preeminence in advanced American painting abruptly diminished, supplanted by movements that prioritized objectivity, irony, and literalism over gestural emotion and subjective scale. Economic data on auction prices and exhibition frequencies indicate this shift, with abstraction's market share declining as galleries and collectors turned to innovations like and , which responded to a burgeoning consumer society and technological reproducibility. The movement's introspective focus, rooted in post-World War II existential angst, clashed with the decade's rising and , rendering its monumental canvases less resonant amid disillusionment and countercultural experimentation. A landmark in this transition occurred on July 9, 1962, when Andy Warhol exhibited 32 Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, employing silkscreen techniques to replicate commercial packaging in a grid format that mocked the heroic individualism of Abstract Expressionist drip paintings and all-over compositions. This series, priced initially at $100 per canvas, sold poorly but signaled Pop Art's embrace of everyday commodities, directly challenging the abstract painters' avoidance of representation and their emphasis on process over product. Warhol's mechanical detachment contrasted sharply with the physicality of artists like Jackson Pollock, whose 1956 death had already weakened the movement's core, paving the way for Pop's commodified irony. Concurrently, emerged in New York around 1960–1962 as a deliberate rejection of Abstract Expressionism's perceived excesses—its chaotic gestures, illusionistic depth, and symbolic freight—favoring instead stark geometric forms, industrial materials like steel and Plexiglas, and viewer-object interactions devoid of narrative or expression. Pioneered by artists such as and Robert Morris, who organized exhibitions like Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966, Minimalism insisted on "specific objects" that occupied real space without metaphor, critiquing the emotional indulgence of predecessors like . This formal austerity aligned with broader 1960s skepticism toward modernist autonomy, as evidenced by Judd's 1965 essay "Specific Objects," which dismissed painting's traditional illusions. Critical reevaluation accelerated the decline; Clement Greenberg, a key proponent of Abstract Expressionism's optical flatness and medium specificity, curated the 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, featuring artists like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler whose stain techniques evolved from but distanced themselves from gestural vigor, emphasizing color's autonomy over action. The death of Franz Kline on May 13, 1962, from rheumatic heart failure at age 51, removed a leading action painter whose black-and-white abstractions epitomized the movement's dynamic energy, further eroding its vitality as younger generations dismissed it as academic. While stalwarts like Mark Rothko persisted into the late 1960s, producing large-scale color fields until his 1970 suicide, institutional focus shifted to the newer idioms, with Abstract Expressionism relegated to historical status by decade's end.

Key Figures and Submovements

Pioneering Artists and Mentors

![The Liver is the Cock's Comb by Arshile Gorky, 1944][float-right] Hans Hofmann, a German-born painter and educator (1880–1966), played a pivotal role as a mentor to emerging American artists in the 1930s and 1940s through his influential teaching at schools in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he emphasized dynamic spatial tensions via color and form known as "push-pull." His students included key figures such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner, whom he instructed in techniques that fostered gestural freedom and emotional expression central to abstract expressionism. Hofmann's own abstract works, evolving from cubist influences, exemplified modernist principles he imparted, bridging European traditions with American innovation. John D. Graham (1881–1961), a Russian-Polish and critic who settled in New York in , served as an intellectual mentor to the nascent movement, advocating for primitive art, , and in his 1937 book System and Dialectics of Art. Graham influenced artists like and by promoting intuitive, biomorphic forms derived from Picasso and , encouraging a rejection of literal representation in favor of subconscious expression. His gatherings and endorsements helped coalesce the New York avant-garde, positioning him as a theoretical guide despite his limited output as a painter. Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), an Armenian-American painter, stands as a pioneering transitional figure whose late works from the early fused with personal abstraction, directly inspiring abstract expressionism's emphasis on process and emotion. Through series like The Garden in (1940–1943) and The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944), Gorky employed fluid, organic lines and thinned paints to evoke subconscious imagery, techniques that echoed in Pollock's drips and de Kooning's gestures. His evolution from mimetic styles to liberated abstraction, amid personal turmoil including a 1946 studio fire, underscored the movement's roots in individual psychic exploration rather than formal ideology. Gorky's mentorship under Graham and interactions with Hofmann further integrated European into American practice.

Action Painting Practitioners

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) is widely regarded as the quintessential , developing his signature drip technique in 1947 by pouring and flinging commercial house paint onto large, horizontally laid , emphasizing the physicality and spontaneity of the creative process over premeditated composition. This method culminated in works like One: Number 31, 1950, a 17-foot-wide created through layered drips and splatters that captured the artist's rhythmic movements, rejecting traditional brushwork and use to prioritize the act of as an extension of the body's energy. Pollock's approach, which he described as a direct record of his emotional and physical engagement, influenced the broader conceptualization of as articulated by critic in 1952, who viewed the as an "arena in which to act." Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) exemplified through vigorous, gestural brushstrokes that blurred figuration and abstraction, often layering thick to convey turbulent motion and psychological intensity, as seen in his Women series beginning in 1950. In Woman I (1950–1952), de Kooning applied paint with aggressive, slashing strokes, building a fragmented female form from smears and drips that reflected the physical struggle of creation, aligning with 's focus on process over finished product. Unlike Pollock's all-over drips, de Kooning's technique retained vestiges of representation amid abstraction, yet shared the emphasis on intuitive, bodily expression, with works like Excavation (1950) demonstrating repeated overpainting to evoke ongoing artistic confrontation. Other notable practitioners included (1908–1984), who adopted expansive, collage-like gestural techniques influenced by , producing large-scale abstractions such as The Seasons (1957–1960) through bold sweeps and torn-paper integrations that highlighted improvisational energy. (1925–1992) extended into vivid, landscape-inspired gestures, as in City Landscape (1955), where rapid, calligraphic strokes layered color to simulate atmospheric depth and emotional immediacy. These artists collectively advanced 's core tenet of performative creation, though individual styles varied in their balance of control and chaos, with de Kooning and often incorporating residual imagery absent in 's purer abstractions.

Color Field Innovators

Color Field painting constituted a meditative dimension of Abstract Expressionism, prioritizing expansive, unmodulated color areas to elicit profound emotional and perceptual immersion over gestural expression. Artists deployed large-scale canvases with minimal forms, harnessing color's inherent properties to convey the sublime and universal experiences. The substyle coalesced around 1950 among , , and , who diverged from by eliminating overt brushwork in favor of color-dominated fields informed by mythic and spiritual themes. Mark Rothko crafted hovering, soft-edged rectangles of vibrant hues, as in No. 13 (1958), where luminous bands of color—often reds, blues, and blacks—merge to envelop viewers in contemplative, quasi-religious states through scale and optical blending. Barnett Newman defined his contributions with the "zip," a narrow vertical line traversing broad monochromatic fields, evident in Onement I (1948) and Concord (1949), where masking tape delineated edges to assert spatial presence and heroic abstraction free from narrative constraints. Clyfford Still achieved early Color Field effects through irregular, riven forms in thick impasto layers applied via palette knife, producing visceral contrasts in canvases like 1943-A (1943) and 1957-D-No. 1 (1957), evoking primal forces via stark color juxtapositions. Helen Frankenthaler innovated in 1952 with , thinning oils to stain unprimed canvas, yielding diffuse, veil-like color saturations that emphasized paint's materiality and translucency, influencing peers toward flatter, less illusionistic abstraction.

Sculptural Contributions

Sculptural contributions to Abstract Expressionism extended the movement's emphasis on gestural process, emotional immediacy, and large-scale abstraction beyond canvas into three dimensions, primarily through direct fabrication techniques like welding and assemblage using industrial materials. Artists adopted welding torches and metal scraps to mimic the spontaneous marks of , prioritizing the physical act of creation over preconceived form. This paralleled the painters' rejection of representation in favor of raw expression, with sculptures often featuring open, linear structures or crumpled masses that evoked dynamic energy and existential scale. David Smith emerged as the preeminent sculptor aligned with Abstract Expressionist principles, producing large welded steel works from the 1940s onward that translated painting's gestural spontaneity into metal. Born in 1906, Smith began experimenting with in the 1930s but achieved maturity post-World War II, creating open geometric forms like the Sentinel series (1954–1956) and (1951), which combined industrial fabrication with biomorphic and totemic elements on a monumental scale. His process involved on-site at his Bolton Landing studio, drawing inspiration from Jackson Pollock's drip technique and emphasizing direct, unmediated artist-material interaction. Smith's innovations defied traditional sculptural mass, favoring lightweight, planar constructions that captured the movement's existential themes. John Chamberlain advanced these ideas in the late 1950s by repurposing crushed automobile parts into vibrant, twisted assemblages that embodied Abstract Expressionism's tactile vigor in sculpture. Starting around 1957 in —amid the Abstract Expressionist community—Chamberlain's works, such as S (1959), featured auto fenders and hoods painted in bold colors, their crumpled forms evoking the impulsive energy of Willem de Kooning's brushstrokes. Exhibited at Gallery in 1960, these pieces highlighted process over finish, with the hydraulic crushing and welding mirroring drip painting's chance elements while introducing Pop-inflected materiality. Chamberlain's approach solidified the translation of two-dimensional gesture into sculptural volume. Other contributors included Ibram Lassaw, who from 1945 crafted intricate wire and molten metal "thread" sculptures like Milky Way (1950), weaving abstract cosmic forms to express subconscious impulses akin to automatism in painting. Similarly, Theodore Roszak's fabricated steel constructs in the 1950s, such as biomorphic Oryx (1951), incorporated gothic and surrealist influences but aligned with the movement's anti-figurative ethos through direct metalworking. These efforts, though less central than painting, expanded Abstract Expressionism's scope, influencing subsequent minimalism and process art by validating sculpture's role in unscripted, bodily engagement with form.

Critical Reception and Promotion

Early Art Critics and Theoretical Frameworks

Clement Greenberg emerged as a pivotal figure in articulating a formalist theoretical framework for Abstract Expressionism during the , emphasizing the medium's inherent properties such as flatness, opticality, and the rejection of illusionistic depth to advance modernist painting. In his 1948 essay "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," Greenberg argued that contemporary painting confronted a crisis by dissolving traditional pictorial representation into sheer texture and sensation, positioning Abstract Expressionists like as exemplars of this evolution toward medium purity. His advocacy, rooted in earlier writings like from 1939, framed the movement as a continuation of progress, prioritizing formal innovation over narrative or representational content, which he saw as or outdated. Greenberg's influence extended through regular columns in starting in 1942, where he promoted American painters as surpassing European traditions in achieving optical immediacy. In 1955, Greenberg further solidified this framework in "'American-Type' Painting," published in Partisan Review, where he explicitly defined Abstract Expressionism as staining and color-drenched abstraction that eschewed easel conventions for large-scale, wall-like surfaces. This formalist lens privileged sensory experience and self-criticism within the medium, influencing artists like and by insisting on the autonomy of painting from external references. Contrasting Greenberg's optical formalism, Harold Rosenberg developed a gestural, process-oriented theory in the early , conceptualizing Abstract Expressionism as "action painting" that treated the canvas as an arena for existential gesture rather than a representational field. In his seminal 1952 essay "The American Action Painters," published in , Rosenberg described artists approaching the blank canvas not to depict objects but to perform acts of creation, drawing parallels to avant-garde traditions like and in integrating life and art through spontaneous, irreversible marks. This framework highlighted the artist's physical engagement and psychological immediacy, as seen in works by and , where the drip, smear, or slash embodied a rejection of premeditated composition in favor of authentic response. Rosenberg's existential emphasis positioned Abstract Expressionism as a democratic, revolt against commodified , yet it also sparked debates with Greenberg over whether the focus on undermined formal rigor. Together, their frameworks—formalist purity versus action-oriented authenticity—provided competing yet complementary lenses that elevated the movement's critical discourse, though both critics' Marxist and leftist backgrounds informed interpretations potentially overlooking commercial or institutional incentives. Other early voices, such as Robert Coates, who first termed "Abstract Expressionism" in 1946, offered descriptive rather than deeply theoretical support, focusing on the movement's emotional immediacy without the systematic depth of Greenberg or Rosenberg.

Institutional and Governmental Support

The (MoMA) provided significant institutional backing for Abstract Expressionism through its exhibitions, acquisitions, and international outreach programs. Under the presidency of from 1939 to 1953 and again from 1955 to 1960, MoMA promoted the movement as emblematic of American cultural vitality, with Rockefeller personally endorsing it as "free enterprise painting" that contrasted with an traditions. In 1952, MoMA launched its International Program with a five-year grant of $625,000 from the , directed by Porter McCray, which organized traveling exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist works to , , and , enhancing the movement's global visibility. Governmental support emerged amid cultural diplomacy, where Abstract Expressionism was leveraged to symbolize individual freedom against Soviet , though often through indirect channels due to domestic political sensitivities. The U.S. State Department initially faced backlash, withdrawing the 1946–1947 touring exhibition "Advancing American Art"—which included modernist works—for being too abstract and unrepresentative of American values, amid congressional criticism from figures like Representative . By the early 1950s, however, the department and associated agencies sponsored international shows featuring Abstract Expressionists, such as and , to project U.S. artistic innovation abroad. Covertly, the (CIA) channeled funds to promote the movement via proxies like MoMA and the , a CIA-backed organization founded in that organized exhibitions and publications emphasizing artistic autonomy. This "long leash" approach ensured artists remained unaware of the backing, avoiding perceptions of state propaganda, while exhibitions like "The New American Painting" (1958–1960), circulated internationally under MoMA's auspices with CIA facilitation, reached over a dozen countries. Such efforts aligned with broader U.S. policy to counter communist cultural influence, though they coexisted with McCarthy-era scrutiny of abstract art as potentially subversive at home.

International Dissemination

The Museum of Modern Art's International Program organized touring exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist works abroad starting in the early 1950s, with Dorothy Miller's "New American Artists" show in 1958 elevating the movement's global profile by featuring artists like and in multiple venues. A key effort was "The New American Painting," which circulated to eight European cities including , , and from October 1958 to 1959, displaying 150 works by 17 leading practitioners such as and to audiences previously dominated by European . Participation in the marked an early breakthrough, with de Kooning's Excavation exhibited in 1950—the same year Arshile Gorky and joined the U.S. representation—signaling American abstraction's challenge to Parisian supremacy and drawing critical attention across Europe. The 1956 Biennale further amplified this, as curator Katharine Kuh selected diverse American abstracts to broaden perceptions beyond pure gesturalism, influencing Italian and broader European receptions. French critic Michel Tapié accelerated dissemination through his advocacy of art informel, a gestural style paralleling , detailed in his 1952 manifesto Un Art Autre, which promoted exhibitions linking U.S. Abstract Expressionists with European tachistes and extended to Japan and via curated shows. In , the , formed in 1954 under Jirō Yoshihara, adopted elements of spontaneous gesture and material experimentation akin to Pollock's drip technique, as seen in their 1956 and performances that echoed Abstract Expressionism's emphasis on process over representation. Latin American abstraction post-1945 incorporated Abstract Expressionist spontaneity, with artists in and blending it into local movements like Concretism's evolution, fueled by Tapié's tours and U.S. exhibitions that introduced non-figurative scale and emotional immediacy to regional practices. These efforts collectively positioned New York as a rival to by the late , though adaptations abroad often hybridized with indigenous traditions, diluting pure formalism. ![Jean-Paul Riopelle, 1951, Untitled, oil on canvas, 54 x 64.7 cm][float-right] Riopelle's textured abstractions, shown in international venues, exemplify early transatlantic echoes of Abstract Expressionism's materiality in non-U.S. contexts.

Controversies and Debates

Government Funding and Ideological Weaponization

During the , the government, particularly through the (CIA) and the State Department, actively promoted Abstract Expressionism abroad as a cultural counterpoint to Soviet , emphasizing themes of individual freedom and spontaneous creativity inherent in the movement's gestural and non-representational style. This effort began in the late 1940s amid escalating tensions, with the State Department organizing international exhibitions of American art starting in 1947, including works by Abstract Expressionists like , to demonstrate the vitality of democratic societies. By the early 1950s, as McCarthy-era domestic suspicions of waned in favor of anti-communist utility, promotion intensified, with the CIA channeling funds through front organizations to avoid direct association. The CIA's involvement centered on covert financing of cultural entities, notably the (CCF), established in 1950 with CIA backing totaling millions of dollars annually by the mid-1950s, to sponsor exhibitions, publications, and events highlighting Abstract Expressionism as emblematic of Western individualism against Soviet collectivism. The (MoMA) in New York served as a key conduit, with its International Program—directed by figures like Porter McCray, a former aide—organizing tours such as the 1958-1959 "The New American Painting" exhibition, which featured 17 Abstract Expressionists including and and reached 38 cities in 16 European countries, implicitly funded via CIA-linked channels despite artists' and curators' lack of awareness. , MoMA's president from onward and a State Department coordinator for inter-American affairs during , facilitated these ties, leveraging his influence to align institutional efforts with geopolitical aims. This weaponization was explicitly ideological: CIA operative Thomas Braden, who oversaw cultural funding from 1948 to 1952, later confirmed in a 1967 Saturday Evening Post article that the agency spent "not less than $1,000,000 a year" on operations like subsidizing the Boston Symphony and art exhibits to showcase American cultural superiority, arguing that such investments countered communist propaganda by proving the U.S. fostered genuine artistic liberty. Frances Stonor Saunders' 1999 book The Cultural Cold War, drawing on declassified documents and interviews, details how this strategy positioned Abstract Expressionism—despite its roots in pre-war European influences—as a non-conformist antidote to Stalinist dogma, with CIA memos from the 1950s praising its "anti-totalitarian" essence. Critics like Eva Cockcroft, in her 1974 Artforum essay, contended that this elevation ignored domestic leftist critiques of the movement while serving to launder taxpayer funds into propaganda, though primary evidence indicates no direct payments to artists themselves, only to promotional infrastructure. The program's efficacy stemmed from plausible deniability and alignment with existing avant-garde currents, but revelations in the 1960s—prompted by Ramparts magazine's 1967 exposé on CIA-CCF ties—sparked debates over co-optation, with some historians noting that while the promotion amplified Abstract Expressionism's global reach, it did not fabricate the movement, which had gained traction organically in New York by the late 1940s through galleries like Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century. Post-Cold War analyses, including declassified CIA files released in the 2000s, affirm the scale: over 500 cultural operations by 1967, with Abstract Expressionism as a flagship in the "psychological warfare" arsenal to erode Soviet cultural hegemony. This episode underscores how state intervention, while effective in ideological terms, entangled aesthetic evaluation with realpolitik, prompting ongoing scrutiny of art's autonomy amid superpower rivalry.

Questions of Artistic Merit and Skill

Critics have long questioned the artistic merit of Abstract Expressionism, particularly its apparent rejection of traditional technical virtuosity in favor of raw gesture and non-representational form, which some view as diminishing the evidence of laborious skill evident in historical masterpieces. Techniques such as Jackson Pollock's and pouring of paint, developed in the late , have been derided as mechanistic or accidental, akin to spilling household paint rather than manifesting disciplined craftsmanship. This perspective posits that the movement's emphasis on spontaneity and process over finished precision lowers the barrier to entry, allowing outputs indistinguishable from amateur efforts. In (1975), argued that Abstract Expressionism's elevation derived not from superior aesthetic or technical qualities but from the elaborate theoretical frameworks supplied by critics like and , who imbued gestural abstraction with intellectual gravitas disproportionate to its material execution. Wolfe contended this shift prioritized verbal —the "word"—over the painted object, effectively decoupling merit from demonstrable skill and enabling institutional acclaim for works lacking representational competence or refined draftsmanship. Such critiques highlight a causal disconnect: the movement's post-World War II prominence correlated more with promotional narratives of American and psychological depth than with empirical measures of painterly mastery, like anatomical accuracy or perspectival illusionism. Counterarguments emphasize that many Abstract Expressionists built upon foundational training in conventional methods, equipping them to innovate within abstraction. , for example, enrolled at the Art Students League of New York in 1930, studying under Thomas Hart Benton for three years and absorbing regionalist figurative techniques, including modeling and composition, before transitioning to drip methods around 1947. Similarly, artists like and demonstrated proficiency in drawing and anatomy prior to fully abstract pursuits, suggesting that their gestural works harnessed acquired skills in paint handling, scale management, and rhythmic control rather than forsaking them. Defenders, including Greenberg, maintained that the movement's merit lay in advancing modernist —focusing on medium-specific properties like flatness, opticality, and color immediacy—which demanded acute sensitivity to material limits and perceptual effects, distinct from but comparable in rigor to representational . This formalist view holds that achievements in evoking spatial illusion through all-over composition or subtle tonal gradations, as in Barnett Newman's zip paintings from onward, require empirical mastery of pigment behavior and viewer response, verifiable through the works' enduring optical impact rather than mimetic fidelity. Ultimately, the debate underscores a tension between skill as technical replication of reality and skill as expressive command of abstract elements, with Abstract Expressionism's value hinging on the latter's capacity to convey existential immediacy without illusionistic crutches.

Commercialization and Market Dynamics

The commercialization of Abstract Expressionism accelerated in the post-World War II era, as New York galleries transitioned the movement from experimentation to marketable commodities amid the city's rising status as a global art hub. Dealers such as Sidney Janis and played pivotal roles in fostering this shift; Janis, who began exhibiting Abstract Expressionists like and in the late 1940s, bridged critical acclaim with collector interest, while Castelli's collaborations and eventual gallery openings in the 1950s helped institutionalize sales to affluent buyers. This period saw initial sales prices remain modest—often in the hundreds to low thousands of dollars—reflecting a time lag between critical endorsement from figures like and broader commercial viability, with widespread profitability emerging only in the as institutional purchases grew. Market dynamics intensified with the 1950s economic expansion, where post-war prosperity and New York's art infrastructure enabled speculative buying, though Abstract Expressionism's abstract scale and emotional intensity initially deterred mass appeal compared to more figurative works. Galleries acted as gatekeepers, curating exhibitions like the 1951 Ninth Street Show—supported by Castelli—to build collector networks, gradually elevating prices as museums such as the acquired key pieces, signaling investment value. By the 1970s and 1980s, auction houses like and drove , with de Kooning's abstracts fetching multimillions; for instance, his Untitled XXV (1977) sold for approximately $47.1 million in 2016, underscoring scarcity and historical prestige as causal drivers of valuation rather than intrinsic skill debates. Controversies persist over whether this commercialization distorted artistic intent, with critics arguing that dealer promotion and Cold War-era institutional backing inflated a niche style into a speculative asset class, detached from broader public engagement. , however, shows sustained demand tied to verifiable factors like limited supply—many artists produced few large-scale works—and collector psychology favoring rarity, as seen in Rothko's No. 7 (1951) estimated at $70 million in 2021 sales. Recent auctions, such as Joan Mitchell's four works totaling $45.2 million in 2024, indicate resilient market dynamics, though fluctuations (e.g., post-1980s corrections) highlight vulnerability to economic cycles over ideological narratives.

Legacy and Long-Term Impact

Influence on Later Art Movements

Abstract Expressionism directly influenced the development of in the 1950s and 1960s, where artists like and Morris Louis adopted and refined its emphasis on large-scale color application, often using thinned paints to create stained effects on unprimed canvas, building on Jackson Pollock's poured techniques to prioritize optical and emotional resonance over gestural drama. This evolution culminated in , a term coined by critic in his 1964 exhibition, featuring artists such as and Jules Olitski who rejected the tactile and subjectivity of gestural Abstract Expressionism in favor of flat, hard-edged color fields designed for perceptual immediacy. The movement's dominance in postwar New York prompted reactive formations in and during the late and , with Minimalists like and stripping away Abstract Expressionism's emotional excess and illusionism to embrace industrial materials, geometric simplicity, and literalist objectivity as a critique of its perceived romantic individualism. Similarly, Pop artists including and countered its introspective abstraction by reintroducing representational imagery from consumer culture, using mechanical reproduction techniques to challenge the aura of authenticity central to Abstract Expressionist works. In sculpture, Abstract Expressionism's emphasis on process and materiality extended to artists like John Chamberlain, whose 1959 crumpled automobile metal assemblages translated Pollock's dripped energy into three-dimensional form, influencing subsequent assemblage and process-based practices. Later, the 1980s revival, seen in the raw, figurative-distorted paintings of and , echoed the movement's gestural vigor and mythic scale while incorporating historical and personal narratives absent in the originals.

Cultural and Societal Ramifications

Abstract Expressionism facilitated the transition of the global art capital from to following , positioning the as the epicenter of modernist innovation and underscoring American cultural ascendancy amid postwar reconstruction. This relocation of artistic influence reflected broader geopolitical shifts, with the movement's emphasis on spontaneous, individualistic expression aligning with narratives of American liberty in contrast to European traditions and Soviet . In the societal sphere, the movement's valorization of the artist's subconscious and gestural process resonated with existentialist themes prevalent in post-1945 American intellectual life, channeling collective traumas from the war and into a non-representational that prioritized emotional authenticity over figurative . This inward focus contributed to a cultural where served as a vehicle for personal , influencing mid-century therapeutic practices and educational curricula that increasingly incorporated expressive techniques over technical draughtsmanship. Covert institutional promotion, including by entities like the CIA through initiatives such as the 1950s exhibitions, amplified the movement's reach, framing it as emblematic of democratic creativity against totalitarian conformity—though artists themselves often resisted such politicization. These efforts had lasting ramifications, embedding abstract modes in international perceptions of American identity and fostering a legacy of art-as-freedom that permeated Cold War-era strategies, even as domestic audiences grappled with the movement's perceived inaccessibility. Over decades, Abstract Expressionism's tenets permeated societal norms around , normalizing in public institutions and media, which in turn shaped generational attitudes toward as an elite, interpretive endeavor rather than communal representation, contributing to polarized public engagement with .

Economic Valuation and Contemporary

Abstract Expressionist artworks continue to command premium prices in the auction market, reflecting their status as blue-chip investments tied to American . Jackson Pollock's drip paintings have set benchmarks, with Number 5, 1948 fetching $140 million at in 2006, and recent sales demonstrating sustained demand, including Composition with Red Strokes exceeding $55 million. Willem de Kooning's works have similarly excelled, with Untitled XXV (1977) selling for $66.3 million at in 2016, and total auction sales reaching $195.2 million in 2022 alone, underscoring resilience amid broader market fluctuations. Mark Rothko's pieces, such as Untitled (1960) from the Museum of Modern Art collection, realized over $50 million at in May 2025, while his 2012 record for Orange, Red, Yellow stands at $86.9 million. These valuations stem from —many key works reside in museums or private collections—and perceived emotional and historical depth, with Abstract Expressionism outperforming other periods at due to its role in shifting global art dominance to New York. However, the broader contracted 12% in 2024 to $57.5 billion, with high-end sales ($10 million+) dropping 39-45% in volume and value by mid-2025, though blue-chip segments like Abstract Expressionism have shown relative stability as investors seek tangible assets during economic uncertainty. In contemporary contexts, Abstract Expressionism retains relevance through its influence on process-oriented and gestural in modern practices, yet faces scrutiny for economic dynamics that prioritize over substance. Critics argue that stratospheric prices collapse if shifting tastes deem the works' subjective forms lacking enduring merit, potentially rendering them akin to speculative bubbles rather than intrinsic value stores. Empirical auction data counters this by evidencing consistent appreciation for verified masterpieces, driven by institutional validation and collector confidence, though reliance on rarity and highlights vulnerabilities to and disputes. Despite debates, the movement's economic footprint endures, with abstract works often appreciating during downturns as hedges against .

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