After Wwii the Center of the Art World Moved to

The Evolution of Abstruse Expressionism

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

Learning Objectives

Explain the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s

Central Takeaways

Key Points

• Abstract expressionism has an epitome of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practice, the term is practical to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite unlike styles, and even to piece of work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist.
• Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works, almost of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded information technology.
• Abstract expressionist paintings share sure characteristics, including the utilize of big canvases and an all-over approach, in which the whole sail is treated with equal importance.

Key Terms

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

Abstract Expressionism Overview

Abstruse expressionism was an American mail service–World War 2 art move. Although the term abstruse expressionism was first practical to American fine art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been used previously in Germany's Der Sturm magazine in 1919.

Abstract expressionism is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German language expressionists with the anti-figurative artful of the European abstract schools, such as futurism, the Bauhaus, and synthetic cubism. Additionally, information technology has an image of beingness rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practise, the term is applied to whatever number of artists who worked (by and large) in New York during the 1940s.

Abstruse 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 abstruse expressionists' works, in reality about of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded information technology. 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 adult the definitions and possibilities that artists had available in the cosmos of new works of art. Although abstract expressionism spread speedily throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York and California. Abstract expressionist paintings share sure characteristics, including the use of large canvases and an all-over approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges).

No. 5: Jackson Pollock is known for his techniques in activeness painting, a manner of abstruse expressionism in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being advisedly applied, as seen in this painting washed in 1948.

Jackson Pollock's energetic action paintings, with their decorated feel, are different both technically and aesthetically from the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning. In dissimilarity to the emotional free energy and gestural surface marks of Pollock and de Kooning, the color-field painters initially appeared to be absurd and ascetic, eschewing the individual marker in favor of large, flat areas of color, which these artists considered to exist the essential nature of visual abstraction, forth with the actual shape of the canvas. In later 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 upwards to and during World State of war II, modernist artists, writers, and poets, likewise as of import collectors and dealers, fled Europe and the onslaught of the Nazis for prophylactic haven in the United states. New York replaced Paris as the new centre of the art world.

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstruse expressionism—a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, Joan Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early on Modernism via the great teachers who arrived in America, similar Hans Hofmann from Deutschland and John D. Graham from Russia.

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

Jackson Pollock

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

Pollock redefined what it was to produce art. His motility away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating bespeak to the artists of his era and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw canvass on the flooring where information technology could exist attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials—essentially took making art beyond whatever prior boundary.

Jackson Pollock and Action Painting

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

Learning Objectives

Describe Jackson Pollock's method of action painting

Fundamental Takeaways

Cardinal Points

• Action painting was adult as part of the abstruse expressionism motility that took place in mail–World War Two America, especially in New York, during the 1940s through until the early on 1960s.
• Action painting places the accent on the deed of painting rather than the final work every bit an artistic object.
• Jackson Pollock challenged traditional conventions of painting past using synthetic, resin-based paints, laying his canvas on the floor, and using hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes to apply paint.

Cardinal Terms

• abstract: Art that does non depict objects in the natural earth, but instead uses colour and course in a non-representational style.
• aesthetic: Concerned with beauty, artistic impact, or advent.

Action Painting

Activity painting is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvas, rather than existence carefully applied with a castor. The resulting work often emphasizes the concrete act of painting itself equally an essential aspect of the finished work.

Action painting is inextricably linked to abstract expressionism, a school of painting popular in mail service-World War Two America that was characterized past the view that art is non-representational and chiefly improvisational. The major artists associated with this motion are Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, among others.

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

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

Activeness painting refers to the spontaneous activity that was the action of the painter—through arm and wrist move, painterly gestures— and led to paint that was thrown, splashed, stained, splattered, poured, and dripped. The painter would sometimes permit the paint drip onto the canvas while rhythmically dancing or fifty-fifty while standing on tiptop of the unstretched sheet laying on the floor—both techniques invented by one of the nearly of import abstruse expressionists: Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock

My painting does not come from the easel. I adopt to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I tin walk around it, 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 House 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

Later his motion 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 fluid than traditional pigment and, at that time, were a novel medium. Pollock described his apply of household paints, instead of art paints, as "a natural growth out of a demand."

He used hardened brushes, sticks, and fifty-fifty basting syringes as paint applicators. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension past 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, also as the work of other artists from that time.

In the procedure of making paintings in this style, he moved abroad from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. In addition, he besides moved away from the use of just the hand 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 stop to the search for figurative elements in his paintings, and so he abandoned titles and started numbering his paintings instead. The numbering relates to the style composers championship their works. Furthering the musical metaphor, Pollock's action paintings have been often described as improvisational works of art, similar to how jazz musicians approach the performance of a slice.

Expiry

At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style 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 commercial gallery and there was great demand from collectors for his new paintings.

In response to this pressure, forth with personal frustration, his long-term problem with alcoholism worsened. He painted his two last works in 1955. On August xi, 1956, Pollock died in a unmarried-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving nether the influence of alcohol.

After Pollock'south demise at age 44, his widow, Lee Krasner, managed his manor and ensured that Pollock'due south reputation remained stiff despite changing fine art-world trends. They are both buried in Dark-green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Island, NY.

Color-Field Painting

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

Learning Objectives

Differentiate color-field painting from other contemporary abstruse art such every bit abstract expressionism

Fundamental Takeaways

Fundamental 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, mail service-painterly abstraction, and lyrical abstraction.
• Singled-out from the emotional energy and gestural surface marks and paint handling seen in the work of abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, colour-field painting came across as absurd and ascetic.
• The movement places less accent on gesture, brushstrokes, and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process, with color itself condign the subject matter.
• Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Clyfford Nevertheless, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Morris Louis are among the many artists who used color-field techniques in their piece of work.
• Color-field painters revolutionized the way paint could be effectively practical, through their use of acrylic pigment and techniques such equally staining and spraying.

Cardinal Terms

• abstract 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 paint is dribbled, splashed, or poured onto the sail to obtain a spontaneous and totally abstract epitome.
• lyrical abstraction: A type of abstract painting related to abstract expressionism; in use since the 1940s.

Colour-Field Painting

Colour-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 proponents were among the pioneering abstruse expressionists.

Colour-field is characterized primarily past its utilise of large fields of apartment, solid colour spread across or stained into the canvass to create areas of unbroken surface and a flat movie plane. The motility places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes, and activity than abstruse expressionism, favoring instead an overall consistency of class and process, with colour itself becoming the subject affair.

Encompassing several decades from the mid-20th century through the early 21st century, the history of  color-field painting tin can be separated into 3 divide just related generations of painters:

1. Abstruse expressionism.
2. Mail-painterly abstraction.
3. Lyrical brainchild.

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

Clement Greenberg

The focus of attending in the contemporary art globe began to shift from Paris to New York after Globe State of war II and the development of American Abstract Expressionism. During the late 1940s and early on 1950s, Cloudless Greenberg was the commencement 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).

Color-Field Formats

Past the tardily 1950s and early 1960s, young artists began to break 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, colour-field artists used formats of stripes, targets, and simple geometric patterns to concentrate on color equally the dominant theme their paintings.

Color-field painting initially referred to a particular type of abstruse expressionism, exemplified especially in the piece of work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Withal, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and several series of paintings past Joan Miró.

Color-field painting sought to rid 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 describe the focus of the painting to color, and the interactions of colour, as the nearly important element.

Harran II: During the late 1950s and early on 1960s, Frank Stella was a pregnant figure in the emergence of minimalism, post-painterly abstraction, and color-field painting. His shaped canvases of the 1960s revolutionized abstract painting, such as this one from 1967.

Beginning: This colour-field painting is characterized by unproblematic geometric forms and repetitive, regulated systems. It was painted by Kenneth Noland in 1958.

Who's Afraid of Scarlet, Xanthous and Bluish?: The flat, solid moving-picture show plane that is typical of color-field paintings is axiomatic in this 1966 piece past Barnet Newman, where the color cherry takes centre phase.

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

Water-soluble, artist-quality acrylic paints beginning became commercially available in the early on 1960s, coinciding with the color-field movement. The most mutual applications were:

• Stain painting, where artists mix and dilute their paint in buckets or coffee cans to make it a more fluid liquid, then pour information technology onto raw, unprimed canvas and draw shapes and areas equally they stain.
• Spray painting, a technique using a spray gun to create big expanses and fields of color sprayed beyond the canvas.
• The utilise of stripes.

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

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

The New York School

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

Learning Objectives

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

Cardinal Takeaways

Cardinal Points

• The New York School was an informal group of abstruse painters and other artists in NYC though it has go associated most with the abstract expressionist movement. Although abstruse expressionism spread apace throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York Urban center and California.
• New York School artists drew inspiration from surrealism and contemporary fine art movements such equally action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, and experimental music.
• The work of the New York Schoolhouse was documented through annual exhibitions of painting and sculpture from 1951–1957, well-nigh notably in the ninth 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 aesthetic philosophy, pre-dating abstract expressionism, that aims for the liberation of the mind past emphasizing the disquisitional and imaginative powers of the subconscious.
• GI Bill: The Servicemen'due south Readjustment Human action of 1944, known informally equally the GI Bill, was a law that provided a range of benefits for returning World War II veterans (ordinarily referred to every bit GIs).
• abstract expressionism: An American genre of modern art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstract forms.

The New York Schoolhouse

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. Information technology 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 action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world'south vanguard circle.

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

Adult female V: Willem de Koonig was an influential abstract expressionist painter.

Abstract Expressionism

A school of painting that flourished later on Globe State of war Two until the early 1960s, abstract expressionism is characterized by the view that art is non-representational and chiefly improvisational. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, and an all-over approach whereby the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (every bit opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges). The canvass as the loonshit became a credo of activeness painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the colour-field painters.

The post-World State of war II era benefited some of the artists who were recognized early on past art critics. Some artists from New York, such every bit Norman Bluhm and Sam Francis, took advantage of the GI Bill and left for Europe, to render later with acclaim.

Many artists from all across 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 greatly increased. Painters, sculptors, and printmakers created art that was termed activity painting, fluxus, color-field painting, hard-edge painting, pop art, minimal fine art and lyrical brainchild, amid other styles and movements associated with abstract expressionism.

9th Street Fine art Exhibition

The ninth 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 it was the stepping-out of the post-war New York avant-garde, collectively known as the New York School.

The testify was hung by Leo Castelli, as he was liked by most of the artists and thought of as someone who would hang the exhibition without favoritism. The opening of the evidence was a corking success. According to the critic, historian, and curator Bruce Altshuler, "It appeared as though a line had been crossed, a stride into a larger art globe whose future was bright with possibility."

Interdisciplinary Influences in the New York School

In add-on 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 gimmicky avant-garde art movements, in detail the activeness painting of their friends in the New York City art world similar Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

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

At that place are also commonalities among the New York School and members of the shell-generation poets who were agile in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in New York Urban center, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William South. Burroughs, Diane Wakoski, and several others.

Abstract Expressionist Sculpture

During the postwar menses, 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 by abstract expressionism, minimalism, and popular art

Key Takeaways

Primal Points

• Abstract expressionist sculpture was greatly influenced by surrealism and its accent on spontaneous or hidden creation.
• Minimalist sculptures often set out to betrayal the essence or identity of a subject through the elimination of all non-essential forms or concepts. These works are oftentimes characterized by 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 apply of found-objects and how they reproduced everyday commercial objects as fine art.

Key Terms

• pop art: An art move that emerged in the 1950s, that presented a claiming to traditions of fine fine art past including imagery from popular culture such every bit advertisement, news, etc.
• institute object: A natural object, or one manufactured for some other purpose, considered every bit part of a work of art.

Abstract Expressionism and Sculpture

While Abstract Expressionism is most closely associated with painting, a number of sculptors were integral to the movement every bit 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 exist important members of the movement.

Similar to abstract 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 movement, was more interested in process than product, which can make it difficult to visually distinguish works by aesthetics alone, and so it is of import to take into account what the creative person has to say about their process.

The sculptures of David Smith, for example, sought to express ii-dimensional subjects that had never earlier been shown in three dimensions. His piece of work blurred the distinctions between sculpture and painting, more often than not making use of delicate tracery rather than solid form, with a 2-dimensional appearance that contradicted the traditional idea of sculpture in the round.

Aboriginal Household: David Smith was an important 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 not about self-expression. Instead, Minimalist works often gear up out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through the elimination of all non-essential forms or concepts.

These works are often characterized by geometric, cubic forms, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and the utilize of industrial materials. Some prominent artists who worked with sculpture and were associated with minimalism (though non all agreed with the clan) 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's manus in these cases speak to the notion of exposing the truthful class of the sculptural object, a significant tenet of the minimalist movement.

Donald Judd

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

Judd'due south "Untitled," 1977, applies the simplicity and geometric course typical of minimalist works. Fabricated from concrete, the piece comes beyond as potentially industrially created equally it lacks the marking of the artist's hand that is and so often seen in works of fine art, favoring instead a absurd austerity that highlights the qualities of the form and the material used to fabricate it.

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

Popular Art

There were numerous artists working in sculpture who were associated with the pop art movement. Two of import examples are Claes Oldenburg and George Segal.

Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg began his creative do equally part of a group of artists reacting to Abstruse Expressionism'southward 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 subsequently created sculptures of similar subjects on larger and larger scales, first sewing soft sculptures out of sheet, then turning to large outdoor monuments in public spaces.

George Segal

George Segal, some other creative person associated with the pop-fine art motion, was best known for his life-size figures fabricated from plaster and bandage casts. These figures, oft left with minimal color and detail and given a ghostly, hollow advent, inhabited tableaux synthetic of found objects such as a street corner, a bus, or a diner.

Common practices seen in pop-art sculptural piece of work include the brandish of constitute fine art objects, the representation of consumer goods, the placing of typical not-art objects within a gallery setting, and the abstraction of familiar objects. We can run across this abstraction in such works equally Plug by Oldenburg.

This reproduction of a familiar or mundane object is displayed at such an increased size that the subject affair becomes abstracted, its original role simultaneously contradistinct and highlighted.

Plug: Claes Oldenburg produced oversized reproductions of familiar objects in increased sizes to abstract the subject matter, such every bit this one done in 1970.

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

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