Abstract Art is a modern movement in American painting that began during the late forties and then was a favoured trend in Western painting throughout the 1950s. 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. Many of those worked, lived, or had exhibitions in New York City.

Although it is the general designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most apt title of the kind of art created by the artists. Actually, the movement comprised various different painterly styles varying in both technique and quality of application. Despite this vast area of difference, Abstract Expressionist paintings also possess some general elements. They are primarily abstract — that is to say, they are based around forms not drawn from the real world.

They furthermore master free, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they exhibit wide freedom of technical skill and application to create this goal, with a special importance placed on the use of the malleable physical nature of paint to call up expressive qualities (for example, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They place likewise emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of paint in a type of internal improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with the similar purpose of displaying the strength of the creative unconscious in art. They demonstrate the conscious abandonment of regular structured composition formed by use of discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated grounds, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Finally, the paintings fill huge canvases to grant these aforementioned visual signs both monumentality and engrossing might.

The first Abstract Expressionists had two iconic forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted suggestive biomorphic figures by using a free, lightly linear and liquid paint application; and Hans Hofmann, who created dynamic and strongly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally constructed paintings. Another key influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on American shores in the late 1930s and early 1940s of a whole host of Surrealists and other European avant-garde artists escaping Nazi-dominated Europe. The European artists quickly influenced the native New York City painters and granted them an intimate insight of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is usually considered as having started with the artworks style by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning through the late 1940s and early 1950s.

While acknowledging the differentiation of styles in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three broad approaches can be isolated. The first was action painting which is indicated by a loose, rapidfire, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in techniques partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling paint openly onto the canvas. Pollock initially practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas to create multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into thrilling and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes building richly coloured and textured images. Kline used dynamic, sweeping black strokes onto white canvas for building starkly monumental forms.

The following area within Abstract Expressionism is demonstrated by numerous varied styles starting from the lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes found in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic pictures of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The third and least emotionally expressive ground was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large spaces or dimensions of flat colour and thin diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative outcomes. The leading colour-field painter was Rothko; the majority of his works consist of wide combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to shine and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism created a great impact on both the American and European art circles through the 1950s. Indeed, the movement marked the shift of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City during the postwar decades. During the period of the fifties, the movement’s younger followers increasingly heeded the direction of the colour-field painters. By the 1960s, the movement’s young practitioners had mostly drifted away from the extreme expressiveness of the action painters.

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