What is Abstract Art?
Abstract Art is a broad movement in American painting that came up around the late 40s and then turned into a dominating trend in Western painting in the 50s. The top American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Some others included Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. Many of the artists worked, lived, or exhibited in New York City.
While it is the commonly accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not a proper description of the pieces created by these artists. In truth, the movement comprised various different painterly styles that varied in both technical application and quality of method. Despite this area of difference, Abstract Expressionist paintings share a number of wider aspects. They are primarily abstract — that is to say, they depict forms which are not drawn from the real world.
They furthermore display unrestricted, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they show vast freedom of skill and application to create this outcome, with importance exerted on the use of the changeable physical character of paint to call up expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They show the same kind of emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of paint in a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with the comparable purpose of demonstrating the power of the creative subconcious in art. They display the conscious neglect of regular structured composition found with discrete and segregable areas and their replacement with a single unified, unvaried field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Finally, the paintings fill huge canvases to give those aforementioned visual signs both monumentality and engrossing strength.
The first Abstract Expressionists had two iconic forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensual biomorphic shapes by using a free, intricately linear and liquid paint technique; and Hans Hofmann, who used dynamic and fully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally constructed pieces. An early important influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the Western shores in the late 1930s and early forties of a troupe of Surrealists and other such European avant-garde artists escaping the rise of the Nazi party Europe. These European artists greatly moved the native New York City painters and privileged for them an intimate view of the vanguard of European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is usually regarded as having commenced with the paintings style by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning through the late 40s and early fifties.
Remembering the variety of techniques in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general approaches can be isolated. First was action painting which is indicated by a loose, speedy, dynamic, or violent handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in technique somewhat dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint straight onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints on raw canvas to build up multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used especially vigorous and expressive brushstrokes building up richly coloured and textured images. Kline made use of powerful, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas for starkly monumental forms.
The second field of Abstract Expressionism is represented by a number of varied styles beginning with the highly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes of paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the highly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic paintings of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The remaining and least emotionally expressive approach was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large areas or blocks of flat colour and thin diaphanous paint to master quiet, subtle, almost meditative effects. The outstanding colour-field painter was Rothko; the large part of his artworks consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular spaces that tend to shine and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism made a particular impact on both the American and European art worlds during the 50s. Indeed, the movement sparked the transition of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City through the postwar decades. During the decade of the 1950s, the the youth of the movement increasingly followed the direction of the colour-field painters. By the 60s, the movement’s young participants had largely drifted away from the high expressiveness of the action painters.
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