What is Abstract Art?
Abstract Art is a broad movement in American painting that showed up in the late 1940s and then was a predominant trend in Western painting in the 1950s. The leading American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Contemporaries were 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 these worked, lived, or had shows in New York City.
While it is the common designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most appropriate title of the type of art created by these artists. In actual fact, the movement was made up of numerous different painterly styles that differentiated in both technical skill and quality of expression. Despite this differentiation, Abstract Expressionist paintings possess some general aspects. They are fundamentally abstract — that is to say, they depict forms that were not assumed from the outer world.
They furthermore push limitless, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they show wide freedom of technique and application to attain this outcome, with importance put on the manipulation of the changeable physical characteristic of paint to call up expressive qualities (like, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They express the same kind of importance on the unstudied and intuitive application of that paint in a method of psychic improvisation like the automatism of the Surrealists, with the comparable intent of finding the force of the creative subconcious in art. They display the conscious rejection of regular structured composition found by use of discrete and segregable areas and their replacement with a unique and unified, unvaried grounds, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill sizeable canvases to create for those aforementioned visual signs both monumentality and engrossing power.
The leading Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic shapes with a free, delicately linear and liquid paint technique; and Hans Hofmann, who used dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally constructed artworks. An early special influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on US shores in the late 1930s and early forties of a whole host of Surrealists and other such European avant-garde artists who fled Nazi-dominated Europe. Those artists quickly moved the native New York City painters and gave them a more intimate view of the vanguard of European art. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is now seen as having commenced with the painting done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning through the late forties and early 50s.
Without disregarding the diversity of style of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general approaches can be distinguished. One was action painting which is characterized by a loose, quickfire, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in techniques partially dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling 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 thrilling and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used especially vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline utilised dynamic, sweeping black strokes onto white canvas to build starkly monumental forms.
The second approach with Abstract Expressionism is demonstrated by a number of varied styles starting with the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the highly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic works of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The remaining and least emotionally expressive field was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large spaces or dimensions of flat colour and thin diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative works. The outstanding colour-field painter was Rothko; the large part of his pieces consist of vast combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular fields that tend to gleam and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism cast a important impact on both the American and European art worlds throughout the 50s. Indeed, the movement marked the change of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar time. Throughout the time of the 50s, the the younger artists of the movement increasingly came to the trend of the colour-field painters. By the 1960s, those young artists had commonly drifted away from the high voltage expressiveness of the action painters.
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