Art Movement That Focused on Expressing Emotion and Feelings Through Nonrepresenetaitioal

The Development of Abstract Expressionism

Abstruse expressionism was an American, mail service–World War II art movement.

Learning Objectives

Explain the abstruse expressionist movement of the 1940s

Cardinal Takeaways

Primal Points

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

Key Terms

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

Abstract Expressionism Overview

Abstract expressionism was an American post–Earth War Two art movement. Although the term abstract expressionism was first applied to American fine art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, information technology had been used previously in Germany'southward Der Sturm magazine in 1919.

Abstract expressionism is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and cocky-deprival of the High german expressionists with the anti-figurative artful of the European abstract schools, such as futurism, the Bauhaus, and synthetic cubism. Additionally, it has an epitome of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied 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 on 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 most of these paintings involved careful planning, peculiarly since their large size demanded information technology. In many instances, abstract art unsaid the expression of ideas that concern the spiritual, the unconscious, and the listen.

Characteristics of Abstract Expressionist Painting

Abstract expressionism expanded and adult the definitions and possibilities that artists had available in the creation of new works of art. Although abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York and California. Abstruse expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases and an all-over arroyo, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the eye being of more interest than the edges).

No. five: Jackson Pollock is known for his techniques in action painting, a mode of abstract expressionism in which pigment is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the sail, rather than being carefully practical, equally seen in this painting done in 1948.

Jackson Pollock'southward energetic action paintings, with their busy experience, 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 cool and austere, eschewing the private marking in favor of large, apartment areas of color, which these artists considered to exist the essential nature of visual abstraction, forth with the bodily shape of the canvas. In later years, color-field painting has proven to exist both sensual and deeply expressive, albeit in a different way from gestural abstract expressionism.

New York

During the menstruum leading upwardly to and during Globe War 2, modernist artists, writers, and poets, also as of import collectors and dealers, fled Europe and the onslaught of the Nazis for rubber oasis in the United States. New York replaced Paris as the new heart of the art world.

The 1940s in New York City 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 great teachers who arrived in America, like Hans Hofmann from Germany and John D. Graham from Russia.

Graham'south influence on American art during the early on 1940s was particularly visible in the piece of work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Gorky's contributions to American and globe art are difficult to overestimate. His works—such as The Liver is the Erect's Comb, The Betrothal 2, and One Year the Milkweed—immediately prefigured abstruse expressionism.

Jackson Pollock

During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's 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 work of fine art was every bit important as the piece of work of fine art itself.

Pollock redefined what it was to produce fine 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 procedure—the placing of unstretched raw sheet on the floor where information technology could be attacked from all four sides using creative person materials and industrial materials—essentially took making art across any prior boundary.

Jackson Pollock and Action Painting

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

Learning Objectives

Describe Jackson Pollock's method of action painting

Key Takeaways

Primal Points

• Action painting was developed as part of the abstract expressionism motion that took identify in post–World State of war 2 America, peculiarly 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 terminal work as an creative object.
• Jackson Pollock challenged traditional conventions of painting past using synthetic, resin-based paints, laying his canvas on the flooring, and using hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes to apply paint.

Key Terms

• abstract: Art that does not depict objects in the natural globe, merely instead uses colour and form in a non-representational fashion.
• artful: Concerned with beauty, artistic touch, or appearance.

Action Painting

Action painting is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the sail, rather than beingness carefully applied with a brush. The resulting work often emphasizes the concrete 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 pop 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 Marking Rothko, among others.

The term action painting was coined by the American 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 School painters and critics. According to Rosenberg, the canvas was not an object, but rather "an arena in which to human action. "

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 actual work of fine art, which was in the procedure of the painting's creation.

Action painting refers to the spontaneous activeness 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 drip onto the canvas while rhythmically dancing or fifty-fifty while standing on top of the unstretched sail laying on the flooring—both techniques invented by one of the most important abstruse expressionists: Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock

My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched sheet to the difficult wall or the flooring. 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 fashion I tin can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally exist in the painting.

Born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, Jackson Pollock moved to New York City in 1930, where he studied under 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 expanse of Due east Hampton, Long Island, NY.

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

Materials and Process

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

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

In the process of making paintings in this fashion, he moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. In addition, he also moved away from the use of only the manus and wrist, since he used his whole torso 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, and then he abandoned titles and started numbering his paintings instead. The numbering relates to the style composers title their works. Furthering the musical metaphor, Pollock's action paintings have been often described equally improvisational works of art, like to how jazz musicians approach the functioning of a piece.

Death

At the superlative of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style and by 1951 his works had turned darker in color. This was followed by a return to color, and he reintroduced figurative elements. During this period Pollock moved to a more commercial gallery and there was slap-up demand from collectors for his new paintings.

In response to this pressure, along with personal frustration, his long-term problem with alcoholism worsened. He painted his two concluding works in 1955. On August 11, 1956, Pollock died in a single-automobile crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving nether the influence of alcohol.

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

Color-Field Painting

Color-field painting can exist recognized by its large fields of solid color spread across or stained into the canvas to create areas of unbroken surface and a apartment pic aeroplane.

Learning Objectives

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

Key Takeaways

Primal Points

• Color-field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York Urban center during the 1950s and 1960s. It is closely linked to abstract expressionism, postal service-painterly abstraction, and lyrical abstraction.
• Distinct from the emotional energy and gestural surface marks and paint treatment seen in the piece of work of abstract expressionists similar Jackson Pollock, color-field painting came beyond as cool and austere.
• The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes, and action in favor of an overall consistency of grade and process, with color itself becoming the subject matter.
• Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Morris Louis are amongst the many artists who used color-field techniques in their work.
• Colour-field painters revolutionized the way paint could be effectively applied, through their utilize of acrylic paint and techniques such as staining and spraying.

Key Terms

• abstract expressionism: An American genre of modernistic 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 canvas to obtain a spontaneous and totally abstract prototype.
• lyrical abstraction: A type of abstract painting related to abstract 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 past European modernism and closely related to abstruse expressionism, many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstruse expressionists.

Color-field is characterized primarily past its use of large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvass to create areas of unbroken surface and a flat flick plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes, and action than abstract expressionism, favoring instead an overall consistency of grade and process, with color itself condign the subject field matter.

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

1. Abstract expressionism.
2. Post-painterly brainchild.
3. Lyrical brainchild.

Some of the artists made works in all three eras that relate to all of the 3 styles.

Cloudless Greenberg

The focus of attention in the contemporary art world began to shift from Paris to New York later Earth State of war II and the development of American Abstruse Expressionism. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Clement Greenberg was the first fine art critic to propose and identify a dichotomy betwixt differing tendencies within the abstract expressionist catechism—especially between action painting and what Greenberg termed post-painterly brainchild (today known as color-field).

Color-Field Formats

Past the late 1950s and early 1960s, young artists began to interruption away stylistically from abstruse expressionism, experimenting with new ways of treatment pigment and color. Moving away from the gesture and malaise of action painting towards apartment, clear picture planes and a seemingly calmer linguistic communication, color-field artists used formats of stripes, targets, and simple geometric patterns to concentrate on colour every bit the dominant theme their paintings.

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

Colour-field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric and gesture. Artists similar Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Friedel Dzubas, and Frank Stella ofttimes used greatly reduced formats, simplified or regulated systems, and basic references to nature to draw the focus of the painting to colour, and the interactions of color, equally the nigh of import chemical 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 colour-field painting. His shaped canvases of the 1960s revolutionized abstract painting, such equally this 1 from 1967.

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

Who's Afraid of Cherry, Yellow and Blue?: The flat, solid picture plane that is typical of color-field paintings is axiomatic in this 1966 piece by Barnet Newman, where the color blood-red takes centre stage.

An important distinction between colour-field painting and abstract expressionism is the way paint is handled. The nearly basic defining technique of painting is the awarding of paint, and the colour-field painters revolutionized the mode paint could be finer applied.

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

• Stain painting, where artists mix and dilute their paint in buckets or coffee cans to make it a more than fluid liquid, then cascade it onto raw, unprimed canvas 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 use 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 creative person. However, color-field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive, albeit in a unlike way from gestural abstract expressionism.

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

The New York School

The New York Schoolhouse was an informal group of American abstruse 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

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• The New York School was an breezy group of abstruse painters and other artists in NYC though it has go associated near with the abstruse expressionist movement. Although abstruse expressionism spread rapidly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York Metropolis and California.
• New York School artists drew inspiration from surrealism and contemporary art movements such every bit activity 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, nearly notably in the 9th Street Fine art Exhibition.
• In addition to painting, the New York School was associated with many poets, dancers, composers, jazz musicians, and writers.

Key Terms

• surrealism: An artistic motility and an aesthetic philosophy, pre-dating abstract expressionism, that aims for the liberation of the heed past emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the hidden.
• GI Beak: The Servicemen'southward Readjustment Human activity of 1944, known informally as the GI Pecker, was a law that provided a range of benefits for returning Earth State of war II veterans (commonly referred to equally 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 grouping of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians that was active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York Metropolis. It represented, and is ofttimes synonymous with, the fine art movement of aAbstract expressionism, such as the piece of work of Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning.

The artists of the New York School drew their inspiration from surrealism and other gimmicky, avant-garde art movements, in particular activeness painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York Urban center art world's vanguard circle.

No. 5: Jackson Pollack is known for his techniques in activity 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 1 done in 1948.

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

Abstract Expressionism

A schoolhouse of painting that flourished afterward World War II 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 apply of big canvases, and an all-over arroyo whereby the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (equally opposed to the center being of more involvement than the edges). The sail as the arena became a ideology of action painting, while the integrity of the pic plane became a credo of the color-field painters.

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

Many artists from all beyond the U.S. arrived in New York City to seek recognition, and by the stop 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, popular art, minimal art and lyrical abstraction, among other styles and movements associated with abstract expressionism.

9th Street Art Exhibition

The ninth Street Art Exhibition was held on May 21–June 10, 1951. It was a historical, basis-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 every bit the New York Schoolhouse.

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

Interdisciplinary Influences in the New York School

In addition 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 fine art movements, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York City fine art earth like 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 absurd jazz musicians in the 1940s and 1950s (such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Gerry Mulligan) coincided with the New York Schoolhouse and abstract expressionism.

There are as well commonalities among the New York School and members of the shell-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 period, many sculptors made work in the prevalent styles of the fourth dimension: abstruse expressionism, minimalism and pop fine art.

Learning Objectives

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

Fundamental Takeaways

Cardinal Points

• Abstract expressionist sculpture was greatly influenced by surrealism and its accent on spontaneous or subconscious creation.
• Minimalist sculptures often set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject area through the elimination of all non-essential forms or concepts. These works are oft 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 important proponents of pop art in their apply of found-objects and how they reproduced everyday commercial objects as art.

Key Terms

• pop art: An art movement that emerged in the 1950s, that presented a claiming to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as ad, news, etc.
• found object: A natural object, or one manufactured for some other purpose, considered every bit office of a work of fine art.

Abstract Expressionism and Sculpture

While Abstract Expressionism is nearly closely associated with painting, a number of sculptors were integral to the move every bit well. David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, Ibram Lassaw, Theodore Roszak, Phillip Pavia, Mary Callery, Richard Stankiewicz, Louise Conservative, and Louise Nevelson in item were considered to be important members of the movement.

Like to abstruse expressionist painting, sculptural work from the movement was greatly influenced past surrealism and its accent on spontaneous or subconscious creation. Abstruse expressionist sculpture, like painting from the move, was more than interested in process than product, which tin can make it difficult to visually distinguish works by aesthetics solitary, so it is important to take into account what the creative person has to say about their process.

The sculptures of David Smith, for example, sought to express two-dimensional subjects that had never before been shown in iii dimensions. His work blurred the distinctions between sculpture and painting, mostly making utilise of delicate tracery rather than solid course, with a two-dimensional appearance that contradicted the traditional idea of sculpture in the circular.

Ancient 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 fine art was not about self-expression. Instead, Minimalist works often set 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 use of industrial materials. Some prominent artists who worked with sculpture and were associated with minimalism (though not 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 calorie-free fixtures. The lack of the mark of the artist's hand in these cases speak to the notion of exposing the truthful form of the sculptural object, a pregnant tenet of the minimalist move.

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 physical, and therefore defied easy nomenclature every bit sculpture.

Judd'due south "Untitled," 1977, applies the simplicity and geometric form typical of minimalist works. Fabricated from concrete, the piece comes across as potentially industrially created as it lacks the mark of the artist's hand that is so often seen in works of art, favoring instead a cool 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 every bit 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 important examples are Claes Oldenburg and George Segal.

Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg began his creative practice as part of a grouping of artists reacting to Abstract 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 afterward created sculptures of similar subjects on larger and larger scales, first sewing soft sculptures out of canvas, then turning to big outdoor monuments in public spaces.

George Segal

George Segal, some other creative person associated with the pop-art movement, 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 appearance, 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 display of found 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 as Plug by Oldenburg.

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

Plug: Claes Oldenburg produced oversized reproductions of familiar objects in increased sizes to abstruse the discipline matter, such as this one washed in 1970.

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

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