Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism is an art movement dating from 1940. The gallery holds 504 works in this movement, including works by Augustus Vincent Tack, Marsden Hartley and Henri Matisse. Browse Abstract Expressionism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Abstract Expressionism was the first American art movement to win international influence, emerging in New York City during and just after the Second World War. As fascism and war scattered Europe's avant-garde, leadership in advanced art shifted from Paris to Manhattan, where émigré Surrealists mingled with a loosely affiliated group of American painters. Drawing on Surrealist automatism, the biomorphic abstraction of Arshile Gorky, European pioneers such as Wassily Kandinsky, and the mural-scale ambition many artists had absorbed working for the Depression-era Federal Art Project, this "first generation" flourished roughly between 1943 and the mid-1950s. In 1949 Robert Motherwell popularized the term "New York School" for the circle, which gathered at venues like the Eighth Street "Studio 35."

The movement is usually divided into two tendencies. The "action painters," so named by critic Harold Rosenberg in his 1952 essay "The American Action Painters," treated the canvas as "an arena in which to act": Jackson Pollock laid raw canvas on the floor and poured, flung, and dripped enamel across it, as in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Willem de Kooning fused slashing gesture with the figure in his ferocious Woman series (Woman I, 1950–52). Franz Kline reduced the impulse to stark black-and-white architectures of brushwork. The "color field" painters, championed by critic Clement Greenberg, pursued the opposite: Mark Rothko's luminous, hovering rectangles, Barnett Newman's vertical "zips," and Clyfford Still's jagged sheets of pigment sought the sublime through expanses of saturated color.

Common to both wings were enormous scale, an emphasis on the flat picture plane, spontaneity, and the conviction that the act of painting could register raw emotion and existential urgency. Other central figures included Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler, whose stain technique pointed toward what came next.

By the late 1950s Abstract Expressionism had become the dominant style of Western painting and a symbol, in Cold War terms, of American cultural freedom. It grew partly from Surrealism and paralleled Europe's gestural Art Informel, while provoking the reactions that defined the following decade: the cool detachment of Minimalism and the brash imagery of Pop Art, both of which positioned themselves against its heroic subjectivity.