ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

World War IIAt the end of World War II, Europe lay in ruins- financially, emotionally and physically.

The war took the lives of a ¼ million British people, 600,000 French and 5 million Germans and twenty million Russians.

The Nazi Holocaust accounted for six million of these deaths.

Refugees and displaced persons numbered forty million.

Many prominent European artists had fled from Nazi oppression to the United States, which emerged from the war economically strong and optimistic.

Immigration After the war, the center of the art world shifted to New York following its long tenure in Paris.

Among the artists who settled in New York were Mondrian, Léger, Duchamp, Dali, Andre Breton and Hans Hofmann.

They worked taught, exhibited and brought new ideas, opening new possibilities for American artists.

This immigration made modernism no longer a distant, European phenomenon.

Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Siqueros also exhibited and taught in New York in the 1930s encouraging artists away from traditional easel painting.

War had altered the consciousness of the developed world in subtle but profound ways.

The Nazi genocide machine had taken human cruelty to a new low, and the atomic bomb gave humankind terrifying new powers: People were now living in a world they had the power to destroy in minutes.

These conditions formed the background for art and life in Europe and the United States at the close of the war.

Abstract ExpressionismStarted: 1943

Ended: Late 1965Abstract Expressionism: a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.

All were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal themes, and most were shaped by the legacy of Surrealism, a movement that they translated into a new style fitted to the post-war mood of anxiety and trauma.

In their success, the New York painters robbed Paris of its mantle as leader of modern art, and set the stage for America's post-war dominance of the international art world.

Elaine de Kooning, Bullfight, 1959

Key IdeasThey were influenced by the era's leftist politics, and came to value an art grounded in personal experience

Having matured as artists at a time when America suffered economically and felt culturally isolated and provincial, the Abstract Expressionists were later welcomed as the first authentically American avant-garde. Their art was championed for being emphatically American in spirit - monumental in scale, romantic in mood, and expressive of a rugged individual freedom.

Political instability in Europe in the 1930s brought several leading Surrealists to New York, and many of the Abstract Expressionists were profoundly influenced by the style and by its focus on the unconscious.

It encouraged their interest in myth and archetypal symbols and it shaped their understanding of painting itself as a struggle between self-expression and the chaos of the unconscious

Aaron Siskind. Chicago. 1948

Abstract Expressionism

The horrors of World War II, impelled artists to rethink the relationship between art and life. The dislocations caused by war led them to explore visual realms other than the representational and narrative.

One result as Abstract Expressionism, a culmination of the expressive tendencies in painting from Fauvism and the automatic methods of Surrealism.

Moved away from the realistic styles of the 30’s and to experiment with more expressive and inventive ways of creating. = Personal

Moved away from public issues of history and social comment that Depression-era painting had emphasized.

Rudloph Burckhardt. Jackson Pollock Painting in East Hampton, Long Island. 1950

Jackson Pollock 1912-1956

The leading innovator of Abstract Expressionism. He studied with both Thomas Hart Benton and the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros.

The rhythmic structure of Benton’s style and the mural-scale art of the Mexicans influenced Pollock’s poured paintings.

Searched for ways to express primal human nature, Pollock also studied Navajo sand painting and psychologist Carl Jung’s theories of the unconscious.

His belief that he was painting for the age of the “atom bomb and the radio” led to innovative techniques.

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

1950Created by dripping thin paint onto the canvas rather than brushing it on.

Working on huge canvases placed on the flor, Pollock was able to enter the space of the painting physically and psychologically.

The huge format allowed sample room for his sweeping gestural lines.

Pollock dripped, poured and flung paint, yet he exercised control and the selection by the rhythmical, dancing movements of his body.

Franz Klein Chief1950

no matter how energetic and urgent his pictures seemed to be, they were always carefully considered in their execution.

So much so that critics have speculated wildly on the sources behind images such as this. Chief was the name of a locomotive Kline remembered from his childhood, and it's possible to read the image as a sensory reminiscence of its power, sound and steaming engine.

Some also believed that the artist's obsession with black was connected to his childhood spent in a coal-mining community dominated by heavy industry

In this painting, Kline used commercial paint and housepainter’s brushes to create thick

black lines on a white background. Kline’s painting has been described as looking like tar

smeared on slabs of concrete or steel girders twisted around canvas. It is evocative of shapes

and structures found in the city, such as bridges, buildings, tunnels, engines, and roads.

Kline said, “I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.”

Meryon1960-1

The personal style he developed during this time, using simplified forms, became increasingly more abstract.

Many of the figures he depicted are based on the locomotives, stark landscapes, and large mechanical shapes of his native, coal-mining community in Pennsylvania.

This is sometimes only apparent to viewers because the pieces are named after those places and objects, not because they actually look like the subject

Lee KranserThaw1957

Thaw is an artist's ode to a joyous spring bursting forth with exuberant brushstrokes and vibrant color after too long a winter.

Lee Krasner's body of work contains many such paintings inspired by nature and worked with an unfettered spirit.

The repetition of oval shapes drawn with the brush and partially filled in with color suggests tropical foliage ripe and fruitful and yet unlike any found on earth

Hers is an abstract nature inspired by Henri Matisse

Her strokes have an unerring energy and athleticism that scorns revision.

These are the gestures of an action painter liberating herself from fidelity to nature and finding instead its inner fecundity.

Willem de KooningWoman and

Bicycle1952-3

Willem de Kooning never believed that abstraction and representation were mutually exclusive.

As he stated: “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it–drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.”

Woman and Bicycle, one of a series of “Woman” paintings he made between 1950 and 1953, depicts a standing woman, whose form is clearly visible despite the painterly integration of her body into the surrounding field of non-objective marks.

Although the female figure is one of the most traditional subjects in the history of art, the woman in de Kooning’s painting distinctly belongs to the 1950s.

Her bright yellow dress, high heels, and garish smile—with a second toothy grin hanging below it like a necklace—reflect the glamorous pin-up girls and movie stars of the period.

Door to the River1960

He sought authenticity of experience, not only in the making of his paintings but also in the representation of the experience on canvas.

Door to the River is part of a series made in the 1950s to 1960s, in which de Kooning's brushstrokes appear to be completely spontaneous, to reflect the presence of both the artist and the viewer, when one sees the canvas with its lively physicality

Hans Hofmann

John ChamberlandEssex1960

Essex, a sculpture made of car parts found in junkyards, is a wall relief that looks like an inflated abstract painting.

Spontaneously crafted by chance intuitions during its assembly process, the sculpture Essex justifies his inclusion in the group.

Additional colors were applied to reinforce the palette of common auto paints and emphasize the broken surfaces that bulged out from the wall and captured light on their reflective surfaces.

The sharply cut pieces of steel Chamberlain used were fitted to bring out linear rhythms like the actions made by the painters' brushes.

Color Field Painting

A related painting style that evolved about the same time as Abstract Expressionism was color field, a term for painting that consists of large areas of color, with no obvious structure, central focus, or dynamic balance.

The canvas of color field painters are dominated by unified images, images so huge that they engulf the viewer.

Color Field painters were concerned with brushstroke and paint texture, but they came to view color as the most powerful communication tool.

Mark Rothko 1903-1970

Rothko's interests in mysticism, religion, and myth hearken back to the Surrealists, and his blocks of color are meant to provide a contemplative, meditative space in which to visually investigate one's own moods and affiliations with the chosen palette.

He sought to distill an essence, or true nature, out of codified hues.

Rothko used color to evoke moods ranging from joy and serenity to melancholy and despair.

Helen Frankenthaler

Mountains and Sea1952

She pioneered staining techniques as an extension of Jackson Pollock’s poured paint and Mark Rothko’s field of color.

Brushstrokes and paint textures were eliminated as she spread liquid colors across a horizontal, unprimed canvas.

As a thin pigment soaked into the raw fabric, she coaxed it into fluid, organic shapes.

Emphasize softness and openness and the expressive power of color.

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