Abstract Art is a vast movement in American painting that started during the late 40s and then become a predominant trend in Western painting during the 50s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others were Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. The majority of these worked, lived, or had their work exhibited in New York City.
Although it is the accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the right description of the kind of art created by the artists. In actual fact, the movement had numerous different painterly styles that were different in both technique and quality of application. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings also possess many general elements. They are primarily abstract – in effect, they are based around forms that were not assumed from the outside world.
They furthermore display open, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they exhibit vast freedom of technique and process to attain this result, with special emphasis placed on the use of the changeable physical form of paint to call upon expressive qualities (like, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They express the same kind of importance on the unstudied and intuitive application of paint in a type of psychological improvisation in the manner of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the similar aim of finding the strength of the creative subconcious in art. They show the conscious abandonment of conventionally structured composition taken from discrete and segregable areas and their replacement with a unique and unified, undifferentiated area, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill sizeable canvases to give those aforementioned visual elements both monumentality and engrossing power.
The earlier Abstract Expressionists had two particular forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic forms using a free, lightly linear and liquid paint process; and Hans Hofmann, who created dynamic and powerfully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally constructed artworks. Another particular influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the US shores in the late 30s and early 40s of a group of Surrealists and other such European avant-garde artists who were fleeing the Nazi party in Europe. These European artists forcefully stimulated the native New York City painters and permitted them a more intimate insight of the vanguard of European art. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally seen as having started with the paintings mastered by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning through the late 1940s and early fifties.
Keeping in mind the differentiation of technique in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general approaches can be distinguished. The first was action painting which is recognised by a loose, rapidfire, dynamic, or strong handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in application somewhat dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint right onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas to create complex and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning employed especially vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline was known for strong, sweeping black strokes on white canvas to build starkly monumental forms.
The second ground with Abstract Expressionism is displayed by several varied styles from the highly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes of paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic pictures of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The remaining and least emotionally expressive field was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large areas or fields of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative effects. The top colour-field painter was Rothko; the large part of his pieces consist of large combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular fields that tend to gleam and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism made a important impact on both the American and European art styles during the 1950s. Indeed, the movement denoted the transition of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar time. Through the time of the fifties, the the movement’s youth increasingly took the leadership of the colour-field painters. By the 60s, the younger participants had largely moved away from the high voltage expressiveness of the action painters.
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