Abstract Expressionism in the Arts Took Place in the

The Development of Abstruse Expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American, post–World War II fine art movement.

Learning Objectives

Explain the abstract expressionist move of the 1940s

Primal Takeaways

Primal Points

• Abstract expressionism has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practise, the term is applied to any number of artists working (by and large) in New York who had quite unlike styles, and fifty-fifty to work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist.
• Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded information technology.
• Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the employ of big canvases and an all-over approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance.

Key Terms

• New York School: The New York School (synonymous with abstract expressionist painting) was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians agile in the 1950s and 1960s in New York Urban center.

Abstract Expressionism Overview

Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. Although the term abstract expressionism was outset applied to American fine art in 1946 past the art critic Robert Coates, information technology had been used previously in Deutschland's Der Sturm magazine in 1919.

Abstract expressionism is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and cocky-denial of the German expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstruse schools, such as futurism, the Bauhaus, and synthetic cubism. Additionally, it has an prototype of existence rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists who worked (mostly) in New York during the 1940s.

Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century, such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although information technology is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists' works, in reality most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their big size demanded it. In many instances, abstract art unsaid the expression of ideas that concern the spiritual, the unconscious, and the listen.

Characteristics of Abstract Expressionist Painting

Abstract expressionism expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had bachelor in the creation of new works of fine art. Although abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York and California. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of big canvases and an all-over approach, in which the whole sheet is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more than involvement than the edges).

No. 5: Jackson Pollock is known for his techniques in action painting, a mode of abstract expressionism in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied, every bit seen in this painting washed in 1948.

Jackson Pollock's energetic action paintings, with their busy experience, are unlike both technically and aesthetically from the trigger-happy and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning. In contrast to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks of Pollock and de Kooning, the colour-field painters initially appeared to exist cool and austere, eschewing the individual mark in favor of large, flat areas of color, which these artists considered to be the essential nature of visual brainchild, along with the actual shape of the sail. In afterwards years, colour-field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive, albeit in a different way from gestural abstract expressionism.

New York

During the flow leading up to and during Globe War II, modernist artists, writers, and poets, as well as important collectors and dealers, fled Europe and the onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. New York replaced Paris as the new heart of the art earth.

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism—a modernist move that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, Joan Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early Modernism via the nifty teachers who arrived in America, like Hans Hofmann from Germany and John D. Graham from Russian federation.

Graham'southward influence on American art during the early 1940s was particularly visible in the work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Gorky'south contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. His works—such every bit The Liver is the Cock's Comb, The Betrothal II, and Ane Yr the Milkweed—immediately prefigured abstract expressionism.

Jackson Pollock

During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all gimmicky fine art that followed him. To some extent, Pollock realized that the journeying toward making a work of art was as important as the work of fine art itself.

Pollock redefined what it was to produce fine art. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating betoken to the artists of his era and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw canvas on the flooring where information technology could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials—essentially took making art across any prior purlieus.

Jackson Pollock and Action Painting

Activeness painting, created by Jackson Pollock, is a manner in which paint is spontaneously splattered, smeared, or dripped onto the sheet.

Learning Objectives

Describe Jackson Pollock'south method of action painting

Fundamental Takeaways

Primal Points

• Action painting was developed as role of the abstract expressionism movement that took place in post–World War Ii America, especially in New York, during the 1940s through until the early on 1960s.
• Activeness painting places the emphasis on the human action of painting rather than the terminal piece of work every bit an creative object.
• Jackson Pollock challenged traditional conventions of painting past using synthetic, resin-based paints, laying his sail on the floor, and using hardened brushes, sticks, and fifty-fifty basting syringes to apply paint.

Key Terms

• abstract: Art that does non depict objects in the natural globe, but instead uses colour and form in a not-representational way.
• aesthetic: Concerned with beauty, artistic bear upon, or appearance.

Action Painting

Action painting is a way of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the sheet, rather than beingness carefully applied with a brush. The resulting piece of work oft emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work.

Action painting is inextricably linked to abstract expressionism, a school of painting popular in post-Earth State of war II America that was characterized by the view that art is non-representational and importantly improvisational. The major artists associated with this movement are Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, amongst others.

The term action painting was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 in his essay The American Action Painters, signaling a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of the New York School painters and critics. According to Rosenberg, the canvass was non an object, but rather "an arena in which to act. "

Rosenberg's critique shifted the emphasis from the object to the struggle of painting itself, with the finished work being simply the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art, which was in the procedure of the painting's creation.

Action painting refers to the spontaneous activity that was the action of the painter—through arm and wrist movement, painterly gestures— and led to paint that was thrown, splashed, stained, splattered, poured, and dripped. The painter would sometimes allow the pigment drip onto the canvas while rhythmically dancing or even while continuing on top of the unstretched sail laying on the floor—both techniques invented past 1 of the most important abstract expressionists: Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock

My painting does not come up from the easel. I adopt to tack the unstretched canvas to the difficult wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this manner I tin walk around it, piece of work from the four sides, and literally exist in the painting.

Born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, Jackson Pollock moved to New York Metropolis in 1930, where he studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York. In 1948 he married the American painter Lee Krasner, and they moved to what is now known as the Pollock-Krasner Firm and Studio in the Springs surface area of East Hampton, Long Island, NY.

The Pollock Barn: Pollock's studio in Springs, New York.

Materials and Process

After his motion to Springs, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, turning to synthetic, resin-based paints called alkyd enamels. These were much more than fluid than traditional paint and, at that time, were a novel medium. Pollock described his use of household paints, instead of fine fine art paints, as "a natural growth out of a demand."

He used hardened brushes, sticks, and fifty-fifty basting syringes as paint applicators. Past defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension past being able to view and utilize paint to his canvases from all directions—the term all-over painting has been used to draw some of his work, equally well as the work of other artists from that fourth dimension.

In the process of making paintings in this way, he moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. In add-on, he also moved abroad from the utilise of simply the hand and wrist, since he used his whole torso to paint.

Jackson Pollock in his studio: The artist threw, splashed, stained, splattered, poured, and dripped paint to create his works.

Titles with Numbers

Pollock wanted an end to the search for figurative elements in his paintings, and then he abandoned titles and started numbering his paintings instead. The numbering relates to the way composers title their works. Furthering the musical metaphor, Pollock's action paintings take been often described equally improvisational works of art, similar to how jazz musicians approach the functioning of a slice.

Death

At the acme of his fame, Pollock abruptly abased the drip manner and past 1951 his works had turned darker in color. This was followed by a return to color, and he reintroduced figurative elements. During this flow Pollock moved to a more commercial gallery and there was peachy demand from collectors for his new paintings.

In response to this pressure, forth with personal frustration, his long-term trouble with alcoholism worsened. He painted his two concluding works in 1955. On August xi, 1956, Pollock died in a single-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving nether the influence of alcohol.

After Pollock's demise at age 44, his widow, Lee Krasner, managed his estate and ensured that Pollock's reputation remained strong despite changing art-earth trends. They are both buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Isle, NY.

Colour-Field Painting

Color-field painting tin can exist recognized by its large fields of solid color spread beyond or stained into the sail to create areas of unbroken surface and a apartment picture plane.

Learning Objectives

Differentiate color-field painting from other contemporary abstract art such equally abstract expressionism

Fundamental Takeaways

Primal Points

• Color-field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York Metropolis during the 1950s and 1960s. It is closely linked to abstruse expressionism, post-painterly brainchild, and lyrical abstraction.
• Singled-out from the emotional energy and gestural surface marks and pigment handling seen in the piece of work of abstruse expressionists similar Jackson Pollock, color-field painting came across as absurd and ascetic.
• The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes, and activity in favor of an overall consistency of form and process, with color itself becoming the subject matter.
• Marker Rothko, Frank Stella, Clyfford All the same, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Morris Louis are among the many artists who used color-field techniques in their work.
• Colour-field painters revolutionized the way paint could be effectively applied, through their use of acrylic paint and techniques such equally staining and spraying.

Key Terms

• abstract expressionism: An American genre of modern art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstruse forms.
• activeness painting: A genre of modern art in which the paint is dribbled, splashed, or poured onto the canvas to obtain a spontaneous and totally abstract image.
• lyrical abstraction: A type of abstract painting related to abstract expressionism; in apply since the 1940s.

Color-Field Painting

Color-field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, many of its notable early proponents were amidst the pioneering abstract expressionists.

Color-field is characterized primarily by its employ of large fields of flat, solid colour spread beyond or stained into the canvas to create areas of unbroken surface and a apartment picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes, and action than abstract expressionism, favoring instead an overall consistency of form and process, with color itself condign the subject thing.

Encompassing several decades from the mid-20th century through the early on 21st century, the history of  colour-field painting tin can exist separated into three split just related generations of painters:

1. Abstract expressionism.
2. Post-painterly abstraction.
3. Lyrical abstraction.

Some of the artists fabricated works in all three eras that relate to all of the three styles.

Clement Greenberg

The focus of attention in the contemporary fine art world began to shift from Paris to New York after World War II and the development of American Abstract Expressionism. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Clement Greenberg was the first fine art critic to suggest and identify a dichotomy between differing tendencies within the abstract expressionist canon—especially between action painting and what Greenberg termed post-painterly abstraction (today known as color-field).

Color-Field Formats

By the belatedly 1950s and early 1960s, immature artists began to break away stylistically from abstruse expressionism, experimenting with new means of handling paint and color. Moving abroad from the gesture and angst of activeness painting towards flat, clear picture planes and a seemingly calmer linguistic communication, color-field artists used formats of stripes, targets, and elementary geometric patterns to concentrate on color as the dominant theme their paintings.

Colour-field painting initially referred to a item type of abstract expressionism, exemplified especially in the piece of work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Yet, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and several serial of paintings past Joan Miró.

Colour-field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric and gesture. Artists like Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Friedel Dzubas, and Frank Stella oftentimes used profoundly reduced formats, simplified or regulated systems, and basic references to nature to draw the focus of the painting to color, and the interactions of color, as the virtually of import element.

Harran II: During the late 1950s and early on 1960s, Frank Stella was a significant figure in the emergence of minimalism, post-painterly brainchild, and color-field painting. His shaped canvases of the 1960s revolutionized abstract painting, such as this one from 1967.

Beginning: This color-field painting is characterized by elementary geometric forms and repetitive, regulated systems. It was painted by Kenneth Noland in 1958.

Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?: The apartment, solid picture plane that is typical of color-field paintings is evident in this 1966 piece by Barnet Newman, where the color cherry takes centre stage.

An of import distinction between color-field painting and abstract expressionism is the way paint is handled. The most basic defining technique of painting is the application of paint, and the color-field painters revolutionized the mode paint could be effectively practical.

H2o-soluble, artist-quality acrylic paints kickoff became commercially bachelor in the early 1960s, coinciding with the colour-field movement. The most common applications were:

• Stain painting, where artists mix and dilute their paint in buckets or coffee cans to make it a more fluid liquid, so cascade it onto raw, unprimed sail and depict shapes and areas equally they stain.
• Spray painting, a technique using a spray gun to create big expanses and fields of color sprayed beyond the canvas.
• The use of stripes.

Color-field painting initially appeared to be absurd and austere due to these methods of handling paint that tended to eschew the private mark of the artist. Yet, color-field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive, albeit in a dissimilar way from gestural abstruse expressionism.

Large A: Jack Bush was a colour-field painter who used geometric, simple forms to highlight the pure interaction of color, as can exist seen in this 1968 piece of work.

The New York School

The New York School was an breezy group of American abstruse painters and other artists that was active in the 1950s and 1960s.

Learning Objectives

Explain what the New York Schoolhouse is known for and who its proponents were

Key Takeaways

Primal Points

• The New York School was an informal group of abstract painters and other artists in NYC though it has become associated most with the abstruse expressionist move. Although abstract expressionism spread apace throughout the United States, the major centers of this way were New York Metropolis and California.
• New York School artists drew inspiration from surrealism and gimmicky fine art movements such as action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, and experimental music.
• The work of the New York Schoolhouse was documented through annual exhibitions of painting and sculpture from 1951–1957, almost notably in the 9th Street Art Exhibition.
• In addition to painting, the New York School was associated with many poets, dancers, composers, jazz musicians, and writers.

Key Terms

• surrealism: An artistic motility and an artful philosophy, pre-dating abstruse expressionism, that aims for the liberation of the mind past emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the hidden.
• GI Nib: The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, known informally as the GI Bill, was a police that provided a range of benefits for returning World War II veterans (commonly referred to as GIs).
• abstract expressionism: An American genre of modern fine art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstruse forms.

The New York School

The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians that was active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York Metropolis. It represented, and is oft synonymous with, the art move of aAbstract expressionism, such every bit the work of Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning.

The artists of the New York School drew their inspiration from surrealism and other gimmicky, advanced art movements, in particular action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world's vanguard circle.

No. 5: Jackson Pollack is known for his techniques in action painting, a manner of abstract expressionism in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than carefully applied, such as this 1 done in 1948.

Woman Five: Willem de Koonig was an influential abstract expressionist painter.

Abstract Expressionism

A school of painting that flourished after Globe War Ii until the early on 1960s, abstruse expressionism is characterized past the view that fine art is non-representational and chiefly improvisational. Abstruse expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, and an all-over approach whereby the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more involvement than the edges). The canvas as the loonshit became a ideology of action painting, while the integrity of the pic aeroplane became a credo of the color-field painters.

The mail-Earth War II era benefited some of the artists who were recognized early on by fine art critics. Some artists from New York, such as Norman Bluhm and Sam Francis, took reward of the GI Neb and left for Europe, to return later with acclaim.

Many artists from all across the U.South. arrived in New York City to seek recognition, and by the end of the decade the list of artists associated with the New York Schoolhouse had greatly increased. Painters, sculptors, and printmakers created art that was termed action painting, fluxus, color-field painting, difficult-edge painting, popular art, minimal art and lyrical abstraction, among other styles and movements associated with abstract expressionism.

ninth Street Art Exhibition

The 9th Street Art Exhibition was held on May 21–June 10, 1951. It was a historical, footing-breaking exhibition that gathered a number of notable artists, and it was the stepping-out of the mail service-state of war New York avant-garde, collectively known as the New York School.

The show was hung by Leo Castelli, as he was liked by most of the artists and idea of as someone who would hang the exhibition without favoritism. The opening of the show was a great success. According to the critic, historian, and curator Bruce Altshuler, "It appeared equally though a line had been crossed, a step into a larger art earth whose futurity was brilliant with possibility."

Interdisciplinary Influences in the New York Schoolhouse

In add-on to painting, the New York School was associated with many poets, dancers, composers, jazz musicians, and writers. Poets drew on inspiration from surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde fine art movements, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York Urban center art globe like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

In the 1960s, the work of the avant-garde minimalist composers La Monte Young, Philip Drinking glass, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley became prominent in the New York art earth. The new bebop and cool jazz musicians in the 1940s and 1950s (such equally Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Gerry Mulligan) coincided with the New York School and abstruse expressionism.

There are also commonalities among the New York School and members of the crush-generation poets who were active in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in New York Urban center, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Diane Wakoski, and several others.

Abstruse Expressionist Sculpture

During the postwar period, many sculptors made piece of work in the prevalent styles of the time: abstruse expressionism, minimalism and pop fine art.

Learning Objectives

Evaluate how sculpture from 1945–1970 was influenced by abstract expressionism, minimalism, and pop art

Cardinal Takeaways

Primal Points

• Abstract expressionist sculpture was profoundly influenced by surrealism and its emphasis on spontaneous or subconscious creation.
• Minimalist sculptures often ready out to expose the essence or identity of a discipline through the emptying of all non-essential forms or concepts. These works are often characterized by geometric, cubic forms, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and the utilize of industrial materials.
• The sculptors Claes Oldenburg and George Segal were important proponents of pop art in their apply of institute-objects and how they reproduced everyday commercial objects as fine art.

Key Terms

• pop art: An art move that emerged in the 1950s, that presented a challenge to traditions of fine fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc.
• constitute object: A natural object, or one manufactured for some other purpose, considered as part of a work of art.

Abstract Expressionism and Sculpture

While Abstract Expressionism is most closely associated with painting, a number of sculptors were integral to the movement besides. David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, Ibram Lassaw, Theodore Roszak, Phillip Pavia, Mary Callery, Richard Stankiewicz, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson in particular were considered to be important members of the motility.

Similar to abstract expressionist painting, sculptural work from the movement was greatly influenced past surrealism and its emphasis on spontaneous or subconscious creation. Abstruse expressionist sculpture, similar painting from the movement, was more interested in process than product, which can brand information technology difficult to visually distinguish works by aesthetics alone, so it is important to take into business relationship what the artist has to say near their process.

The sculptures of David Smith, for example, sought to express two-dimensional subjects that had never before been shown in three dimensions. His piece of work blurred the distinctions between sculpture and painting, mostly making utilise of frail tracery rather than solid form, with a ii-dimensional advent that contradicted the traditional idea of sculpture in the round.

Ancient Household: David Smith was an important abstract expressionist sculptor.

Minimalism

Minimalism during the 1960s and 1970s was a reaction confronting the painterly subjectivity of abstruse expressionism that dominated the previous decades. Minimalist artists explicitly stated that their fine art was not well-nigh self-expression. Instead, Minimalist works often set out to expose the essence or identity of a discipline through the elimination of all not-essential forms or concepts.

These works are often characterized by geometric, cubic forms, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and the use of industrial materials. Some prominent artists who worked with sculpture and were associated with minimalism (though not all agreed with the association) include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Anthony Caro, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin.

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin was an American minimalist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent calorie-free fixtures. The lack of the mark of the artist's mitt in these cases speak to the notion of exposing the true course of the sculptural object, a significant tenet of the minimalist movement.

Donald Judd

Donald Judd, who disavowed the term minimalism, and preferred to refer to his sculptures as specific objects, used uncomplicated, repeated forms to explore space. His works were oftentimes fabricated (rather than sculpted) out of metals, industrial plywood and concrete, and therefore defied easy classification as sculpture.

Judd's "Untitled," 1977, applies the simplicity and geometric grade typical of minimalist works. Fabricated from concrete, the piece comes across as potentially industrially created as it lacks the marker of the artist's hand that is so often seen in works of fine art, favoring instead a cool austerity that highlights the qualities of the form and the textile used to fabricate information technology.

Untitled: Donald Judd, who disavowed the term minimalism, preferred to refer to his sculptures as specific objects. Judd uses uncomplicated, repeated forms to explore space.

Pop Art

There were numerous artists working in sculpture who were associated with the pop art movement. Two of import examples are Claes Oldenburg and George Segal.

Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg began his artistic practice as function of a group of artists reacting to Abstract Expressionism's sublime gestures with figural drawings and papier mache sculptures. His artistic trajectory took him from making found-object paintings littered with urban droppings to plaster sculptures of everyday commercial and manufactured objects. He later created sculptures of similar subjects on larger and larger scales, first sewing soft sculptures out of canvas, and then turning to large outdoor monuments in public spaces.

George Segal

George Segal, another artist associated with the pop-art movement, was best known for his life-size figures made from plaster and cast casts. These figures, often left with minimal color and detail and given a ghostly, hollow advent, inhabited tableaux constructed of found objects such equally a street corner, a bus, or a diner.

Common practices seen in pop-art sculptural work include the display of found fine art objects, the representation of consumer goods, the placing of typical non-art objects inside a gallery setting, and the abstraction of familiar objects. We can encounter this brainchild in such works every bit Plug by Oldenburg.

This reproduction of a familiar or mundane object is displayed at such an increased size that the subject thing becomes abstracted, its original part simultaneously altered and highlighted.

Plug: Claes Oldenburg produced oversized reproductions of familiar objects in increased sizes to abstract the subject matter, such as this one done in 1970.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/abstract-expressionism/

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