Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism, a dominant style of art in America from the end of World War II to the early 1960s.Abstract Expressionism included the gestural painting of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler (1928–); the improvisatory nonobjective metal‐welded sculpture of Herbert Ferber (1906–1991), David Smith (1906–1965), and Seymour Lipton (1903–1986); and the tonal studies of Mark Rothko (1903–1970). Sometimes called “The New York School” because of the many Abstract Expressionist artists centered there from the late 1940s through the 1950s, the style simultaneously erupted in the San Francisco Bay area in the paintings and sculptures of Clyfford Still (1904–1980), Richard Diebenkorn (1922–), and Manuel Neri (1930–), and was subsequently embraced by artists across America. Concurrent with U.S. global ascendancy in politics and industrial production, Abstract Expressionism was critically acclaimed as a uniquely American form of modern art, and New York City declared the capital of contemporary art.

In 1945, art critic Robert Coates of the New Yorker magazine first reported that a style of abstract art, largely devoid of representational subject matter and painted in a gestural and expressionist manner, was gaining ascendancy in America. Abstract Expressionists rejected the narrative and representational styles, widespread public appeal, and political views of 1930s New Deal Era and social realist artists such as Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) and Ben Shahn (1898–1969), as well as the hard‐edged abstract art of interwar modernists like Stuart Davis (1894–1964). Instead, they pioneered improvisational modes of art focused on the physicality of media and personal expression. Pollock's much–publicized “drip paintings” (1947–1950), dubbed “action painting” by critic Harold Rosenberg, were made by placing unprimed canvases on the floor and pouring and dripping paints in precise patterns onto their surfaces. David Smith similarly experimented with materials, techniques, and composition in his abstract metal sculptures of the 1950s. Abstract Expressionist art embodies profound disaffection with the postwar political climate of consensus, Cold War, and nuclear menace, as well as artistic yearning for self‐determination. Some Abstract Expressionist artists retained identifiable subjects as in de Kooning's Woman I, 1950–1952, for example, while others, including Barnett Newman (1905–1970), pursued flatter, nongestural styles.

Despite their differing stylistic preferences, Abstract Expressionist artists were generally allied in aesthetic and technical experimentation, a focus on the creative process, the use of art as a means of self‐realization, the separation of art and popular culture, and the rejection of art for public or social purposes.

The stylistic origins of Abstract Expressionism can be found in Surrealist art (many European artists, such as Hans Hoffman, André Masson, and Max Ernst, as well as the Chilean painter Roberto Matta Echaurren, found refuge in the United States during World War II); the indigenous arts of North America (represented in several exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and 1940s); and renewed interest in nineteenth‐century American transcendentalist landscape painting. The movement's cultural and intellectual underpinnings include the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung; existential philosophy ( Jean‐Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism was translated into English in 1948); and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), a study of myth and the importance of modern mythmakers. The context of Abstract Expressionism also includes such diverse forms of postwar cultural experimentation as the Beat movement in literature; the jazz of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker; avant‐garde dance and composition; the rock‐and‐roll movement in popular music; and the rebellious youth‐culture films of James Dean and Marlon Brando.

Critics such as Clement Greenberg championed Abstract Expressionism as evidence of American cultural superiority and heroic individualism. Later cultural historians explored the ways it illuminated the interconnections of Cold War art and politics. Although succeeded by other art styles such as Pop and Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism remained a major point of departure for artistic and critical explorations, from the process art of Eva Hesse (1936–1970) to the 1980s movement of Neo‐Expressionism.
See also Fifties, The; Painting: To 1945; Painting: Since 1945.

Bibliography

Dore Ashton , The New York School, A Cultural Reckoning, 1972.
Michael Auping, ed., Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, 1987.
Erika Doss , Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism, 1991.
Stephen Polcari , Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, 1991.
Michael Leja , Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, 1993.
Ann Eden Gibson , Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, 1997.

Erika Doss