Abstract Expressionism

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Action Painters

The abstract expressionists—also called "Action Painters" because their blobs, drips, whorls, and scribbles express the process of painting, which they considered the essence of art—were too abstract for untutored American art lovers in the 1950s. The major young American artists of the day were rede-fining art and revolutionizing the aesthetic principles on which it was based, the public be damned. Such painters as Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko drew their inspiration from the Western European movements cubism and surrealism, from the publicly sponsored artists' programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, and from an unrelentingly threatening world political situation. The result was the first distinctly American art movement to have international influence.

Background

With the upheaval of Western Europe during the 1930s and the military threat of the Nazis beginning in 1939, an influential group of artists migrated to New York: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, and others. They were among the most respected modern artists in the world, and by the time of World War II their influence was concentrated in Manhattan. Meanwhile a generation of talented American artists had just emerged from the federally sponsored WPA, painting murals, contemplating the purposes of art in society, and benefiting from federal support providing the freedom to develop their talents and ideas.

American Roots

Beginning in the 1940s with the work of Hofmann and de Kooning, both immigrants who had settled permanently in New York City, a new attitude toward art began to evolve. Providing an American perspective on surrealism (art that attempts to portray experience beyond the realm of conscious perception), this new movement rejected all boundaries—those of form, shape, color, and medium. The artworks tended to be large, more suited to display in warehouses than on living-room walls or in traditional exhibit spaces. Materials were those at hand—house paint (more suitable for dripping than oils), tar, glue and whatever would stick to it, anything that would make a mark.

Theory

Frames were too restrictive and traditional shapes and forms too limiting for the abstract expressionists. The composition of these new artworks was intended to reflect spontaneous motion. Rather than recreating some perception on a canvas, the abstract expressionists recorded action: a splatter of paint, a series of random movements of some object attached to a marker, a mixture of colors producing the random arrangement of various colored objects. De Kooning painted a series of figures of women, departing progressively from realistic portrayals until he reached the point of complete obliteration of form. In fact, it seems that the primary point of representing a figure in his paintings of the 1950s was to distort it and to blur its similarity to a living figure.

Pollock

Pollock liked busy canvases. During the 1950s he developed the technique of drip painting, which was the flinging of paint of different colors onto a surface. The paint drippings recorded the motion of the artist's arm as he worked; the accumulation of sets of these drippings compressed time as the motion of one moment was layered over the motion of another. The drippings also had the effect of obliterating whatever was underneath them, and so the painterly actions of more-recent moments obscured those of earlier sessions, suggesting a philosophy akin to nihilism.

Obscurantists

Such artists as Franz Kline and Motherwell went a step further with their obscurantist tendencies: they obscured everything, so all that was left in their artworks was a nearly blank surface that, in the case of Kline, might have a single line across it or, in the case of Motherwell, might resemble an inkblot.

The Critics

Such aesthetic principles led to puzzling art that can be difficult to view. Moreover, the art enthusiast who turned to art critics for clarification found the explanations more baffling than the art itself. New Republic quoted an example of what it called "'advanced' criticism" from Art News. The subject of the comments is a white canvas by Kline with horizontal, broad, uneven black lines across it (a description that applies to several of his works): "In the past two years, there has been a change in [Kline's] style. Not a drastic one; white and black forms still soar, tumble and stand in as permanent a state of instability as ever. But … the white paint is whiter, bluer, more snow-like. The black pigments differentiate themselves as fat and lean pigments. He endows the absence of totality of refraction with the range of the spectrum. This is achieved by an emotional intensity that seems to burn all the color out of art."

The Audience

The casual museum-goer was confused to the point of annoyance by the art, by its explanation, and by the attention it received. By the mid 1950s works of what was referred to generically as modern art were being routinely sold for over ten thousand dollars. New Republic summarized the opinion of a generation of art lovers lagging slightly behind the Avantgarde in its observation that "uninhibited daubing has recognized educational value for children in early grades and as a therapeutic device in certain instances of adult mental disorder…, We part company [with advocates of modern art] … when the talk turns to 'masterpieces' and when abstract expressionism is held aloft as the apogee of contemporary creativeness."

Sources:

Robert Carleton Hobbs and Gail Levin, Abstract Expressionism; The Formative Years (New York: Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art / New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978);

Robert Myron and Abner Sundell, Modern Art in America (New York: Crowell-Collier / London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971);

"Mystique of the Drip," New Republic, 140 (5 June 1959): 6-7;

Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: Braziller, 1975).