What is Abstract Art?
Abstract Art is a broad movement in American painting that started in the late 1940s and was a preferred trend in Western painting during the fifties. The top 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. Most of those worked, lived, or had their work shown in New York City.
Although it is the general designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most appropriate name of the pieces created by the artists. In fact, the movement was made up of many different painterly styles that differentiated in both technical application and quality of method. Despite this variation, Abstract Expressionist paintings share some general aspects. They are basically abstract — in effect, they depict forms which are not assumed from the outside world.
They furthermore push open, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they display considerable freedom of skill and application to achieve this outcome, with particular emphasis centred on the use of the variable physical nature of paint to create expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They express the same emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive use of paint in a method of psychological improvisation in the style of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the likewise aim of expressing the strength of the creative unconscious in art. They demonstrate the conscious abandonment of regular structured composition formed in discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, unvaried field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill huge canvases to grant the aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing power.
The leading Abstract Expressionists had two original forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensual biomorphic forms with a free, delicately linear and liquid paint method; and Hans Hofmann, who used dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally formed artworks. An early significant influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on US shores in the late thirties and early 1940s of a host of Surrealists and other important European avant-garde artists fleeing the rise of the Nazis in Europe. The avant-garde artists greatly stimulated the native New York City painters and granted them a detailed understanding of the vanguard of European art. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is now seen as having been initiated with the pieces style by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning throughout the late forties and early fifties.
While recognising the differentiation of techniques in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be found. One was action painting which is characterized by a loose, quick, dynamic, or powerful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in application in part dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling paint straight onto the canvas. Pollock initially practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints on the raw canvas to create layered and tangled skeins of paint into stimulating and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning had especially vigorous and expressive brushstrokes creating richly coloured and textured images. Kline employed dynamic, sweeping black strokes onto the white canvas for building starkly monumental forms.
The next field of Abstract Expressionism is demonstrated by many varied styles ranging from the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the highly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic paintings of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The third and least emotionally expressive ground was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large areas or fields of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to master quiet, subtle, almost meditative outcomes. The leading colour-field painter was Rothko; many of his artworks consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to shimmer and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism cast a wide impact on both the American and European art scenes during the 50s. Indeed, the movement marked the change of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City throughout the postwar era. During the time of the fifties, the the young artists of the movement increasingly came to the style of the colour-field painters. By the 1960s, these artists had mostly moved away from the extreme expressiveness of the action painters.
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