After World War Ii the Art Capital of the World Was

The Evolution of Abstract Expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American, post–World War II art movement.

Learning Objectives

Explain the abstruse expressionist movement of the 1940s

Cardinal Takeaways

Primal Points

• Abstruse expressionism has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practice, the term is practical to any number of artists working (more often than not) in New York who had quite different styles, and fifty-fifty to work that is neither particularly abstract nor expressionist.
• Although information technology is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, peculiarly since their large size demanded it.
• Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases and an all-over approach, in which the whole canvass is treated with equal importance.

Primal Terms

• New York Schoolhouse: The New York School (synonymous with abstract expressionist painting) was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City.

Abstract Expressionism Overview

Abstract expressionism was an American post–Globe State of war II art move. Although the term abstract expressionism was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, information technology had been used previously in Germany'due south Der Sturm mag in 1919.

Abstract expressionism is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German expressionists with the anti-figurative artful of the European abstract schools, such as futurism, the Bauhaus, and synthetic cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practice, the term is practical to any number of artists who worked (mostly) in New York during the 1940s.

Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century, such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists' works, in reality well-nigh of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. In many instances, abstract art implied the expression of ideas that concern the spiritual, the unconscious, and the mind.

Characteristics of Abstract Expressionist Painting

Abstract expressionism expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available in the creation of new works of art. Although abstruse expressionism spread chop-chop throughout the United States, the major centers of this fashion were New York and California. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases and an all-over approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (every bit opposed to the center beingness of more involvement than the edges).

No. 5: Jackson Pollock is known for his techniques in activity painting, a style of abstract expressionism in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvass, rather than beingness carefully applied, as seen in this painting washed in 1948.

Jackson Pollock'southward energetic action paintings, with their busy experience, are unlike both technically and aesthetically from the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning. In dissimilarity to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks of Pollock and de Kooning, the color-field painters initially appeared to exist cool and austere, eschewing the individual mark in favor of large, apartment areas of color, which these artists considered to be the essential nature of visual abstraction, along with the actual shape of the canvas. In afterward years, color-field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive, albeit in a different way from gestural abstruse expressionism.

New York

During the period leading upward to and during World War II, modernist artists, writers, and poets, every bit well equally important collectors and dealers, fled Europe and the onslaught of the Nazis for prophylactic oasis in the United States. New York replaced Paris every bit the new eye of the art world.

The 1940s in New York Urban center heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism—a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, Joan Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early Modernism via the peachy teachers who arrived in America, like Hans Hofmann from Frg and John D. Graham from Russia.

Graham'southward influence on American art during the early 1940s was particularly visible in the work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Gorky'southward contributions to American and world fine art are difficult to overestimate. His works—such as The Liver is the Cock's Comb, The Betrothal II, and One Twelvemonth the Milkweed—immediately prefigured abstruse expressionism.

Jackson Pollock

During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all gimmicky art that followed him. To some extent, Pollock realized that the journey toward making a piece of work of art was as important every bit the work of art itself.

Pollock redefined what it was to produce art. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all that came afterward. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials—substantially took making fine art across whatsoever prior boundary.

Jackson Pollock and Action Painting

Action painting, created by Jackson Pollock, is a style in which pigment is spontaneously splattered, smeared, or dripped onto the sheet.

Learning Objectives

Draw Jackson Pollock'south method of activeness painting

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Action painting was developed as part of the abstract expressionism motility that took place in post–Earth War Ii America, peculiarly in New York, during the 1940s through until the early 1960s.
• Action painting places the emphasis on the act of painting rather than the final work as an artistic object.
• Jackson Pollock challenged traditional conventions of painting by using constructed, resin-based paints, laying his canvas on the flooring, and using hardened brushes, sticks, and fifty-fifty basting syringes to apply pigment.

Key Terms

• abstract: Fine art that does non depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses color and form in a non-representational way.
• artful: Concerned with beauty, artistic bear upon, or appearance.

Action Painting

Action painting is a manner of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the sheet, rather than being carefully practical with a brush. The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself every bit an essential aspect of the finished work.

Activeness painting is inextricably linked to abstract expressionism, a school of painting popular in post-World State of war Ii America that was characterized by the view that art is non-representational and chiefly improvisational. The major artists associated with this movement are Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Marker Rothko, amid others.

The term activity painting was coined by the American fine art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 in his essay The American Activeness Painters, signaling a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of the New York School painters and critics. According to Rosenberg, the canvass was not an object, but rather "an arena in which to act. "

Rosenberg'due south critique shifted the emphasis from the object to the struggle of painting itself, with the finished work being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the bodily work of art, which was in the procedure of the painting's creation.

Action painting refers to the spontaneous activity that was the action of the painter—through arm and wrist movement, painterly gestures— and led to paint that was thrown, splashed, stained, splattered, poured, and dripped. The painter would sometimes let the paint baste onto the canvas while rhythmically dancing or even while continuing on tiptop of the unstretched canvas laying on the floor—both techniques invented by one of the nearly important abstruse expressionists: Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock

My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched sail to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a difficult surface. On the flooring I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this fashion I can walk effectually information technology, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting.

Born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, Jackson Pollock moved to New York City in 1930, where he studied nether Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York. In 1948 he married the American painter Lee Krasner, and they moved to what is now known as the Pollock-Krasner Business firm and Studio in the Springs area of East Hampton, Long Island, NY.

The Pollock Barn: Pollock's studio in Springs, New York.

Materials and Process

After his movement to Springs, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, turning to synthetic, resin-based paints called alkyd enamels. These were much more than fluid than traditional pigment and, at that fourth dimension, were a novel medium. Pollock described his use of household paints, instead of art paints, as "a natural growth out of a need."

He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes every bit pigment applicators. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions—the term all-over painting has been used to describe some of his work, too equally the work of other artists from that time.

In the process of making paintings in this way, he moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. In addition, he besides moved away from the employ of merely the mitt and wrist, since he used his whole trunk to paint.

Jackson Pollock in his studio: The artist threw, splashed, stained, splattered, poured, and dripped paint to create his works.

Titles with Numbers

Pollock wanted an end to the search for figurative elements in his paintings, so he abandoned titles and started numbering his paintings instead. The numbering relates to the fashion composers title their works. Furthering the musical metaphor, Pollock's action paintings have been often described as improvisational works of art, like to how jazz musicians approach the performance of a piece.

Death

At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip mode and past 1951 his works had turned darker in colour. This was followed by a render to color, and he reintroduced figurative elements. During this period Pollock moved to a more than commercial gallery and there was neat need from collectors for his new paintings.

In response to this pressure, along with personal frustration, his long-term trouble with alcoholism worsened. He painted his ii last works in 1955. On August 11, 1956, Pollock died in a unmarried-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving under the influence of alcohol.

Afterward Pollock'south demise at historic period 44, his widow, Lee Krasner, managed his estate and ensured that Pollock's reputation remained strong despite changing art-world trends. They are both buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Island, NY.

Color-Field Painting

Color-field painting can be recognized past its large fields of solid color spread across or stained into the sheet to create areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane.

Learning Objectives

Differentiate color-field painting from other contemporary abstract art such as abstract expressionism

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Color-field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York Metropolis during the 1950s and 1960s. It is closely linked to abstract expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, and lyrical brainchild.
• Singled-out from the emotional energy and gestural surface marks and pigment handling seen in the piece of work of abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, color-field painting came across as cool and austere.
• The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes, and activeness in favor of an overall consistency of form and process, with color itself becoming the subject field matter.
• Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Clyfford All the same, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Morris Louis are among the many artists who used color-field techniques in their work.
• Colour-field painters revolutionized the way pigment could be effectively applied, through their use of acrylic paint and techniques such as staining and spraying.

Cardinal Terms

• abstruse expressionism: An American genre of modern art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstract forms.
• action painting: A genre of modern art in which the pigment is dribbled, splashed, or poured onto the canvas to obtain a spontaneous and totally abstract image.
• lyrical abstraction: A type of abstract painting related to abstruse expressionism; in use since the 1940s.

Color-Field Painting

Color-field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York Urban center during the 1950s and 1960s. Inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, many of its notable early on proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists.

Color-field is characterized primarily by its use of large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas to create areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The move places less accent on gesture, brushstrokes, and activeness than abstract expressionism, favoring instead an overall consistency of form and process, with color itself becoming the bailiwick thing.

Encompassing several decades from the mid-20th century through the early 21st century, the history of  color-field painting tin exist separated into three carve up but related generations of painters:

1. Abstract expressionism.
2. Mail service-painterly abstraction.
3. Lyrical abstraction.

Some of the artists made works in all three eras that relate to all of the three styles.

Cloudless Greenberg

The focus of attending in the contemporary art world began to shift from Paris to New York afterward Earth War II and the development of American Abstract Expressionism. During the belatedly 1940s and early 1950s, Clement Greenberg was the start fine art critic to suggest and identify a dichotomy between differing tendencies within the abstract expressionist canon—especially betwixt action painting and what Greenberg termed post-painterly abstraction (today known as color-field).

Colour-Field Formats

Past the tardily 1950s and early 1960s, young artists began to pause away stylistically from abstract expressionism, experimenting with new ways of handling paint and color. Moving away from the gesture and angst of action painting towards flat, clear picture planes and a seemingly calmer language, color-field artists used formats of stripes, targets, and uncomplicated geometric patterns to concentrate on color as the ascendant theme their paintings.

Color-field painting initially referred to a particular blazon of abstract expressionism, exemplified peculiarly in the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Notwithstanding, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and several series of paintings by Joan Miró.

Color-field painting sought to rid fine art of superfluous rhetoric and gesture. Artists similar Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Friedel Dzubas, and Frank Stella often used greatly reduced formats, simplified or regulated systems, and basic references to nature to draw the focus of the painting to color, and the interactions of colour, as the most important element.

Harran II: During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Frank Stella was a significant figure in the emergence of minimalism, mail-painterly abstraction, and colour-field painting. His shaped canvases of the 1960s revolutionized abstruse painting, such as this ane from 1967.

Get-go: This color-field painting is characterized by simple geometric forms and repetitive, regulated systems. It was painted past Kenneth Noland in 1958.

Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?: The flat, solid picture plane that is typical of color-field paintings is evident in this 1966 piece by Barnet Newman, where the color carmine takes center stage.

An important distinction between color-field painting and abstract expressionism is the way paint is handled. The most basic defining technique of painting is the application of pigment, and the color-field painters revolutionized the style paint could be effectively applied.

Water-soluble, artist-quality acrylic paints first became commercially available in the early 1960s, congruent with the colour-field movement. The most common applications were:

• Stain painting, where artists mix and dilute their paint in buckets or coffee cans to go far a more fluid liquid, so cascade information technology onto raw, unprimed canvass and draw shapes and areas as they stain.
• Spray painting, a technique using a spray gun to create large expanses and fields of color sprayed beyond the canvas.
• The utilise of stripes.

Colour-field painting initially appeared to be cool and ascetic due to these methods of handling paint that tended to eschew the individual marking of the artist. However, color-field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive, albeit in a different fashion from gestural abstract expressionism.

Big A: Jack Bush was a colour-field painter who used geometric, simple forms to highlight the pure interaction of color, as tin be seen in this 1968 work.

The New York Schoolhouse

The New York School was an informal group of American abstract painters and other artists that was agile in the 1950s and 1960s.

Learning Objectives

Explain what the New York School is known for and who its proponents were

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• The New York School was an informal group of abstract painters and other artists in NYC though it has go associated nigh with the abstract expressionist movement. Although abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this mode were New York City and California.
• New York School artists drew inspiration from surrealism and contemporary art movements such as action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, and experimental music.
• The work of the New York School was documented through annual exhibitions of painting and sculpture from 1951–1957, most notably in the 9th Street Art Exhibition.
• In improver to painting, the New York School was associated with many poets, dancers, composers, jazz musicians, and writers.

Key Terms

• surrealism: An artistic movement and an artful philosophy, pre-dating abstract expressionism, that aims for the liberation of the listen by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the hidden.
• GI Bill: The Servicemen's Readjustment Deed of 1944, known informally as the GI Neb, was a law that provided a range of benefits for returning World State of war Two veterans (unremarkably referred to as GIs).
• abstruse expressionism: An American genre of modern fine art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstract forms.

The New York School

The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians that was active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. It represented, and is often synonymous with, the fine art movement of aAbstract expressionism, such as the work of Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning.

The artists of the New York School drew their inspiration from surrealism and other contemporary, avant-garde art movements, in particular activity painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world'southward vanguard circumvolve.

No. 5: Jackson Pollack is known for his techniques in activeness painting, a style of abstract expressionism in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvass, rather than carefully applied, such every bit this 1 done in 1948.

Woman 5: Willem de Koonig was an influential abstract expressionist painter.

Abstract Expressionism

A school of painting that flourished after World War 2 until the early 1960s, abstract expressionism is characterized by the view that art is non-representational and chiefly improvisational. Abstract expressionist paintings share sure characteristics, including the utilise of large canvases, and an all-over arroyo whereby the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more than interest than the edges). The canvas as the arena became a credo of activeness painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the color-field painters.

The mail-World War 2 era benefited some of the artists who were recognized early on on by fine art critics. Some artists from New York, such as Norman Bluhm and Sam Francis, took advantage of the GI Bill and left for Europe, to render afterward with acclaim.

Many artists from all beyond the U.S. arrived in New York City to seek recognition, and by the end of the decade the list of artists associated with the New York School had profoundly increased. Painters, sculptors, and printmakers created fine art that was termed action painting, fluxus, colour-field painting, hard-edge painting, popular art, minimal fine art and lyrical brainchild, among other styles and movements associated with abstract expressionism.

9th Street Art Exhibition

The 9th Street Art Exhibition was held on May 21–June 10, 1951. It was a historical, ground-breaking exhibition that gathered a number of notable artists, and information technology was the stepping-out of the post-war New York avant-garde, collectively known equally the New York Schoolhouse.

The bear witness was hung by Leo Castelli, as he was liked past almost of the artists and thought of equally someone who would hang the exhibition without favoritism. The opening of the show was a keen success. According to the critic, historian, and curator Bruce Altshuler, "Information technology appeared as though a line had been crossed, a footstep into a larger art world whose future was brilliant with possibility."

Interdisciplinary Influences in the New York School

In improver to painting, the New York School was associated with many poets, dancers, composers, jazz musicians, and writers. Poets drew on inspiration from surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York Urban center art world like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

In the 1960s, the piece of work of the avant-garde minimalist composers La Monte Immature, Philip Glass, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley became prominent in the New York fine art globe. The new bebop and cool jazz musicians in the 1940s and 1950s (such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Gerry Mulligan) coincided with the New York School and abstract expressionism.

There are besides commonalities among the New York School and members of the beat-generation poets who were active in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in New York City, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Diane Wakoski, and several others.

Abstract Expressionist Sculpture

During the postwar menstruation, many sculptors made work in the prevalent styles of the time: abstract expressionism, minimalism and pop art.

Learning Objectives

Evaluate how sculpture from 1945–1970 was influenced past abstract expressionism, minimalism, and popular art

Central Takeaways

Central Points

• Abstruse expressionist sculpture was greatly influenced past surrealism and its accent on spontaneous or subconscious cosmos.
• Minimalist sculptures often ready out to expose the essence or identity of a subject field through the emptying of all non-essential forms or concepts. These works are often characterized past geometric, cubic forms, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and the use of industrial materials.
• The sculptors Claes Oldenburg and George Segal were of import proponents of pop art in their utilize of plant-objects and how they reproduced everyday commercial objects as fine fine art.

Key Terms

• pop fine art: An art movement that emerged in the 1950s, that presented a challenge to traditions of fine art past including imagery from popular civilisation such as advertizement, news, etc.
• plant object: A natural object, or one manufactured for some other purpose, considered as part of a work of fine art.

Abstract Expressionism and Sculpture

While Abstruse Expressionism is most closely associated with painting, a number of sculptors were integral to the movement as well. David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, Ibram Lassaw, Theodore Roszak, Phillip Pavia, Mary Callery, Richard Stankiewicz, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson in particular were considered to be of import members of the movement.

Similar to abstruse expressionist painting, sculptural work from the movement was greatly influenced by surrealism and its emphasis on spontaneous or subconscious creation. Abstract expressionist sculpture, like painting from the motion, was more interested in procedure than production, which can make it difficult to visually distinguish works by aesthetics alone, so it is important to take into account what the creative person has to say about their procedure.

The sculptures of David Smith, for example, sought to express two-dimensional subjects that had never before been shown in three dimensions. His piece of work blurred the distinctions betwixt sculpture and painting, generally making use of frail tracery rather than solid form, with a two-dimensional appearance that contradicted the traditional idea of sculpture in the round.

Ancient Household: David Smith was an of import abstract expressionist sculptor.

Minimalism

Minimalism during the 1960s and 1970s was a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of abstract expressionism that dominated the previous decades. Minimalist artists explicitly stated that their art was non nearly self-expression. Instead, Minimalist works often set out to expose the essence or identity of a field of study through the elimination of all not-essential forms or concepts.

These works are often characterized by geometric, cubic forms, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and the use of industrial materials. Some prominent artists who worked with sculpture and were associated with minimalism (though not all agreed with the association) include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Anthony Caro, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin.

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin was an American minimalist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. The lack of the mark of the artist'south mitt in these cases speak to the notion of exposing the true form of the sculptural object, a pregnant tenet of the minimalist movement.

Donald Judd

Donald Judd, who disavowed the term minimalism, and preferred to refer to his sculptures equally specific objects, used simple, repeated forms to explore infinite. His works were frequently made (rather than sculpted) out of metals, industrial plywood and concrete, and therefore defied easy classification as sculpture.

Judd'southward "Untitled," 1977, applies the simplicity and geometric course typical of minimalist works. Made from concrete, the slice comes across as potentially industrially created as it lacks the mark of the creative person's hand that is and then often seen in works of art, favoring instead a absurd austerity that highlights the qualities of the class and the fabric used to fabricate it.

Untitled: Donald Judd, who disavowed the term minimalism, preferred to refer to his sculptures equally specific objects. Judd uses simple, repeated forms to explore space.

Popular Art

At that place were numerous artists working in sculpture who were associated with the pop art motion. Two important examples are Claes Oldenburg and George Segal.

Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg began his artistic practice as role of a grouping of artists reacting to Abstruse Expressionism's sublime gestures with figural drawings and papier mache sculptures. His artistic trajectory took him from making found-object paintings littered with urban debris to plaster sculptures of everyday commercial and manufactured objects. He afterwards created sculptures of like subjects on larger and larger scales, first sewing soft sculptures out of canvass, then turning to large outdoor monuments in public spaces.

George Segal

George Segal, another artist associated with the pop-art movement, was best known for his life-size figures fabricated from plaster and bandage casts. These figures, frequently left with minimal color and detail and given a ghostly, hollow appearance, inhabited tableaux constructed of found objects such equally a street corner, a passenger vehicle, or a diner.

Common practices seen in pop-art sculptural work include the display of found art objects, the representation of consumer goods, the placing of typical non-art objects inside a gallery setting, and the abstraction of familiar objects. We can see this abstraction in such works as Plug past Oldenburg.

This reproduction of a familiar or mundane object is displayed at such an increased size that the subject thing becomes bathetic, its original function simultaneously altered and highlighted.

Plug: Claes Oldenburg produced oversized reproductions of familiar objects in increased sizes to abstract the field of study matter, such as this ane done in 1970.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/abstract-expressionism/

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