(movement, 1946 - 1960's)
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, around the outbreak of World War II, many Surrealists fled Europe and settled in New York. Their interest in unmediated expression to reach the absolute soon influenced a young generation of painters struggling to find a voice for American art. The new movement, which became known as Abstract Expressionism, was heavily indebted to the ideas of the European pioneers of abstraction, including Vasily Kandinsky, whose work was championed in influenced a young generation of painters struggling to find a voice for American art. The new movement, which became known as Abstract Expressionism, was heavily indebted to the ideas of the European pioneers of abstraction.
Artists:
A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists" or "The New York School" did, however, share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), William Baziotes (1912–1963), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), and Clyfford Still (1904–1980) advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content...
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Jackson Pollock, considered the foremost Abstract Expressionist, placed his canvases on the floor to pour, drip, and splatter paint onto them and to work on them from all sides, which set him apart from the tradition of vertical easel painting...
...Of the other principal members of de Kooning's Abstract Expressionist cohort, only Philip Guston saw the 1980s, having spent his ultimate energies during the previous decade in one of the most remarkable artistic turnarounds of the last quarter century. For most of the 1970s, while engaged in this dramatic shift from an art of ethereal abstraction to one of darkly comic figuration, Guston was treated as an apostate by his contemporaries...
Jackson Pollock’s art conveys the mindset of Abstract Expressionism. Pollock argued, “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through”. Pollock reveals the life of the painting through “actions,” an energetic technique of dripping and pouring paint on a canvas that is placed directly on the floor. Pollock explained, “On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting… Since this way I can walk around in it… Work from the four sides and be literally ‘in’ the painting...”
