Abstract Art is a broad movement in American painting that began in the late 40s and was a predominant trend in Western painting throughout the 1950s. The leading American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Contemporaries 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. Several of the artists worked, lived, or exhibited their work in New York City.

Although it is the commonly accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the proper category of the body of art created by these artists. In truth, the movement was made up of various different painterly styles that were different in both technical application and quality of application. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings also share a number of wider traits. They are fundamentally abstract — i.e., they are based around forms which are not taken from the real world.

They furthermore proffer free, spontaneous, and unique emotional expression, and they display wide freedom of skill and execution to attain this goal, with a special emphasis targeted on the exploitation of the variable physical form of paint to call up expressive qualities (such as, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They exhibit a similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of the paint in a method of psychic improvisation in the trend of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the likewise intention of displaying the strength of the creative subconcious in art. They display the rejection of normally structured composition found out of discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a unique and unified, unvaried field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Lastly, the paintings fill big canvases to allow those aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing power.

The leading Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensual biomorphic figures by using a free, intricately linear and liquid paint method; and Hans Hofmann, who had dynamic and fully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally structured artworks. Another special influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the American shores in the late 30s and early 1940s of a host of Surrealists and other such European avant-garde artists arriving from the Nazi party in Europe. These artists greatly moved the native New York City painters and permitted them a detailed insight of the vanguard of European artwork. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally seen as having started with the paintings done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning throughout the late 1940s and early fifties.

Keeping in mind the variety of styles of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three wide approaches can be distinguished. First was action painting which is characterized by a loose, quickfire, dynamic, or violent handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in techniques partially dictated by chance, for example dripping or spilling paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock initially practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas to build up complex and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning had highly vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build richly coloured and textured images. Kline employed powerful, sweeping black strokes onto the white canvas creating starkly monumental forms.

The next area of Abstract Expressionism is displayed by several varied styles from the highly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic paintings of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The third and least emotionally expressive area was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters had large spaces or blocks of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative results. The leading colour-field painter was Rothko; many of his works consist of wide combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular blocks that tend to glimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism had a wide influence on both the American and European art worlds throughout the fifties. Indeed, the movement sparked the change of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City throughout the postwar period. Throughout the course of the 50s, the the movement’s youth increasingly took the trend of the colour-field painters. By the 1960s, the movement’s young participants had mostly drifted away from the extreme expressiveness of the action painters.

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