Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism, a visual arts movement that emerged in the late 1930s and 1940s, challenged accepted standards of what was art. Embracing improvisation (simultaneous creation and production), individuality, and energy, it was the first art movement with origins in America. Abstract art moved beyond representing reality as everyone experienced it daily. Rather than depicting people, landscapes, familiar objects, or elements from nature, the Abstract Expressionists used color, shapes, lines, and space to evoke another part of reality.

European artists in the 1920s—the Surrealists, Expressionists, and Cubists—had painted canvases in which objects and people were still recognizable but far from realistic. When World War II broke out in Europe in the late 1930s, many influential artists fled to the United States. Their experiments and explorations had a great influence on American painters. New York City, rather than Paris, became the center of artistic activity. Rejecting the goal of representing the world around them, instead the so-called New York School of painters wanted to convey spontaneous emotions and the subconscious mind (the part of thinking that is not in our awareness).

Many Abstract Expressionist paintings were done on very large canvases. Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) dripped and flung paint onto canvases to allow movement and color to express the subconscious mind. In his paintings, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) achieved great emotional effects by layering and stacking rectangular fields of color, with the colors bleeding into each other at the edges.

Abstract Expressionism was a radical break from traditional art, and at first it was difficult for many to accept. In the political climate of the Cold War in the 1950s, however, Abstract Expressionism became a symbol of American freedom and the quest for the new. Whereas the Soviet Union strictly controlled artistic expression, in the United States Abstract Expressionists were free to experiment as they wished—in keeping with the American ideals of democracy, freedom of expression, and innovation.