What is Abstract Art?

Abstract Art is a vast movement in American painting that showed up in the late forties and turned into a predominant trend in Western painting through the fifties. The premier American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. 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 those worked, lived, or showed their work in New York City.

Though it is the generally accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most apt title of the type of artworks created by the artists. In fact, the movement comprised numerous different painterly styles that differentiated in both technique and quality of work. Despite this, Abstract Expressionist paintings also possess a number of general aspects. They are essentially abstract — in effect, they display forms not assumed from the outside world.

They furthermore emphasize free, spontaneous, and individual emotional expression, and they exercise vast freedom of technical skill and application to achieve this result, with importance exerted on the manipulation of the malleable physical character of paint to call upon expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They place the same importance on the unstudied and intuitive use of the paint in a process of psychic improvisation in the trend of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the likewise aim of expressing the force of the creative subconcious in art. They demonstrate the conscious ignorance of regular structured composition built up by use of discrete and segregable aspects and their replacement with a individual unified, unchanged partition, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill large canvases to allow these aforementioned visual aspects both monumentality and engrossing power.

The first Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted esoteric biomorphic shapes by using a free, intricately linear and liquid paint process; and Hans Hofmann, who made use of dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally structured paintings. An early and key influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the Western shores in the late thirties and early forties of a whole host of Surrealists and the European avant-garde artists fleeing the Nazi party in Europe. The European artists forcefully stimulated the native New York City painters and granted them a more intimate understanding of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally considered as having commenced with the pieces created by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning throughout the late 40s and early 1950s.

Despite the variety of styles in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three broad approaches can be isolated. The first was action painting which is signified by a loose, quickfire, dynamic, or strong handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in techniques largely dictated by chance, for example dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas to build up intricate and tangled skeins of paint into evocative and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning had very vigorous and expressive brushstrokes building up richly coloured and textured images. Kline used mighty, sweeping black strokes onto the white canvas to build starkly monumental forms.

The following approach with Abstract Expressionism is displayed by many varied styles starting from the lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes of paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the highly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic paintings of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The last and least emotionally expressive approach was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters made use of large areas or dimensions of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative outcomes. The outstanding colour-field painter was Rothko; the majority of his works consist of wide combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to glimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism made a wide influence on both the American and European art styles throughout the 1950s. Indeed, the movement initiated the shift of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City through the postwar years. Through the period of the fifties, the younger followers of the movement increasingly took to the style of the colour-field painters. By 1960, these young participants had mostly drifted away from the grand expressiveness of the action painters.

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