New York School

New York School. Term applied to the innovatory painters, especially the Abstract Expressionists, who worked in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and whose critical and financial success helped the city to replace Paris as the world's leading centre of avant-garde art. An exhibition staged by the Los Angeles County Museum in 1965 entitled ‘New York School: The First Generation, Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s’ included the following fifteen artists, giving a good idea of the concentration of talent in the city at this time: William Baziotes, Willem deKooning, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. In the foreword to the catalogue Maurice Tuchman wrote: ‘The title of our exhibition and the criteria behind the choice of artists were based on historical considerations: the first generation of New York School painters were those whose activity centred in New York City after 1940 and who had achieved by 1950 a mature and distinctly individual style. The term “New York School” as a geographical indicator is more valid in application to the first generation than in relation to its followers, for the proliferation and dispersal of the achievement and ideas of the earlier group of artists make it impossible to impose such localized restraints on the younger generation.’ Putting this more pithily, one might say that whereas all the early leaders of Abstract Expressionism worked in New York, some of the main figures of the second generation worked elsewhere.