Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism. The dominant movement in American painting in the late 1940s and the 1950s, characterized by a desire to convey powerful emotions through the sensuous qualities of paint, often on canvases of huge size. It was the first major development in American art to achieve international status and influence, and it is often reckoned the most significant art movement anywhere since the Second World War. The tremendous vitality it brought to the American art scene helped New York to replace Paris as the world capital of contemporary art, and to many Americans the heyday of the movement has already acquired a kind of legendary status as a golden age.

The phrase ‘Abstract Expressionism’ had originally been used in 1919 to describe certain paintings by Kandinsky, and it was used in the same way by Alfred H. Barr in 1929. In the context of modern American painting it was first used by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates (1897–1973) in 1946 and it had become part of the standard critical vocabulary by the early 1950s. The painters embraced by the term worked mainly in New York and there were various ties of friendship and loose groupings among them, but they shared a similarity of outlook rather than of style—an outlook characterized by a spirit of revolt against tradition and a belief in spontaneous freedom of expression. The stylistic roots of Abstract Expressionism are complex, but despite its name it owed more to Surrealism—with its stress on automatism and intuition—than to Expressionism. A direct source of inspiration came from the European Surrealists who took refuge in the USA during the Second World War. The most important in this context was Matta, who promoted what Meyer Schapiro called the ‘idea of the canvas as a field of prodigious excitement, unloosed energies’. The war also brought Peggy Guggenheim back to America, and during its brief lifetime (1942–7) her Art of This Century gallery was the main showcase for Abstract Expressionism during its formative period.

David Anfam (Abstract Expressionism, 1990) writes that ‘Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Rothko, Newman, Kline, Philip Guston, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb are by consensus prime members of the Abstract Expressionist canon.’ Among the secondary figures were William Baziotes, James Brooks, Lee Krasner, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodorus Stamos, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt were major figures, but not central to the movement. The work of these artists varied greatly and was sometimes neither abstract ( de Kooning) nor Expressionist ( Rothko). Attempts have been made to arrange them into stylistic groupings (see ABSTRACT IMAGISTS), but these are of doubtful use as they require so many qualifications. Their work varied from the explosive energy of Pollock's Action Painting to the serene contemplativeness of Rothko's Colour Field Painting. Even within these two polarities, however, there are certain qualities that are basic to most Abstract Expressionist painting: the preference for working on a huge scale; the emphasis placed on surface qualities so that the flatness of the canvas is stressed; the adoption of an all-over type of treatment, in which the whole area of the picture is regarded as equally important; the glorification of the act of painting itself; the conviction that abstract painting could convey significant meaning and should not be viewed in formalist terms alone; and a belief in the absolute individuality of the artist (for which reason most of the Abstract Expressionists disliked being labelled with an ‘ism’, preferring New York School as a group designation).

Almost without exception, the artists who created Abstract Expressionism were born between 1900 and 1915 most of them struggled during their early careers, which coincided with the Depression. Apart from Motherwell, the major figures began as representational painters, but generally moved towards abstraction in the late 1930s or early 1940s. The idea that these artists were beginning to create a new movement took shape in about 1943, and in 1945 Peggy Guggenheim mounted an exhibition called ‘A Problem for Critics’, almost as a challenge for someone to come up with a name for this movement. By 1948, when de Kooning had his first one-man show and Pollock first exhibited his drip paintings, it was approaching maturity. Initially the new way of painting was found perplexing or outlandish by many people, but during the 1950s the movement became an enormous critical and financial success, helped by the support of the influential writers Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. It had passed its peak by 1960, but several of the major figures continued productively after this and a younger generation of artists carried on the Abstract Expressionist torch. By 1960, also, reaction against the movement was under way, in the shape principally of Pop art and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Sculptors as well as painters were influenced by Abstract Expressionism, the leading figures including Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, and Theodore Roszak. The immense significance of the movement in American culture was summed up by Maurice Tuchman when he wrote in 1971: ‘Virtually every important American artist to have emerged in the last fifteen years looks to … abstract expressionism as the point of departure, in the same way that most European artists of the 1920s and 1930s referred in their work to the inventions of cubism’ (The New York School, 1971, revised edn. of the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965). Since then Abstract Expressionism has continued to be influential, notably as one of the sources of Neo-Expressionism, and Robert Hughes considers that the success of the movement has ‘encouraged a phony grandiloquence, a confusion of pretentious size with scale, that has plagued American painting ever since’.