Abstract Art is a modern movement in American painting that was instigated around the late 40s and then was a popular trend in Western painting through the 50s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Some others included 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 artists worked, lived, or exhibited in New York City.

Despite the fact that it is the general designation, Abstract Expressionism is not a proper title of the works created by those artists. In fact, the movement had many different painterly styles that varied in both technical application and quality of expression. Despite this differentiation, Abstract Expressionist paintings also share a number of broad aspects. They are fundamentally abstract — that is, they display forms which were not assumed from the outside world.

They furthermore emphasize unrestricted, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they show high freedom of technical skill and method to reach this result, with a special emphasis put on the exploitation of the variable physical texture of paint to evoke expressive qualities (like, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They express likewise importance on the unstudied and intuitive use of the paint in a form of artistic improvisation similar to the automatism of the Surrealists, with the likewise purpose of demonstrating the influence of the creative unconscious in art. They demonstrate the conscious neglect of conventionally structured composition built up with discrete and segregable aspects and their replacement with a individual unified, unchanged field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill huge canvases to allow these aforementioned visual aspects both monumentality and engrossing strength.

The early Abstract Expressionists had two particular forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted esoteric biomorphic images by using a free, delicately linear and liquid paint technique; and Hans Hofmann, who created dynamic and powerfully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally composed artworks. An early particular influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on Western shores in the late 1930s and early 40s of a group of Surrealists and important European avant-garde artists coming from the Nazis in Europe. These avant-garde artists greatly impressed the native New York City painters and granted them a detailed perspective of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally seen as having started with the paintings mastered by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning during the late forties and early 50s.

Remembering the diversity of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be found. First was action painting which is signified by a loose, quick, dynamic, or powerful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in techniques partially dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling the paint right onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints on the raw canvas to create layered and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used highly vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to create richly coloured and textured images. Kline specialised in strong, sweeping black strokes on white canvas to build up starkly monumental forms.

The second area with Abstract Expressionism is demonstrated by several varied styles starting with the lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes of paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic art of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The remaining and least emotionally expressive area was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters had large spaces or dimensions of flat colour and thin diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative works. The premier colour-field painter was Rothko; the large part of his paintings consist of wide combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to gleam and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism created a great influence on both the American and European art styles through the 1950s. Indeed, the movement marked the shift of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City through the postwar period. In the period of the 50s, the the movement’s youth increasingly took to the style of the colour-field painters. By the 1960s, its participants had generally drifted away from the heated expressiveness of the action painters.

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