What is Abstract Art?
Abstract Art is a wide movement in American painting that was first seen in the late 1940s and then was a common trend in Western painting during the 50s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Contemporaries 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. Several of these worked, lived, or had shows in New York City.
Despite the fact that it is the common designation, Abstract Expressionism is not a proper description of the type of art created by those artists. Actually, the movement was made up of many different painterly styles that varied in both technical application and quality of method. Despite this, Abstract Expressionist paintings also share some common aspects. They are primarily abstract — i.e., they consist of forms that are not taken from the real world.
They furthermore emphasize unrestricted, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exhibit wide freedom of technique and methodology to attain this goal, with particular importance aimed on the manipulation of the variable physical texture of paint to call up expressive qualities (like, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They put the same emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive use of the paint in a kind of psychic improvisation in the style of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the likewise aim of displaying the strength of the creative unconscious in art. They show the conscious rejection of regularly structured composition taken from discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a sole unified, unchanged partition, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill large canvases to create for those aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing strength.
The early Abstract Expressionists had two original forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic shapes by using a free, delicately linear and liquid paint procedure; and Hans Hofmann, who created dynamic and fully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally formed works. Another early and important influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on Western shores in the late thirties and early 1940s of a whole host of Surrealists and other such European avant-garde artists fleeing the Nazis in Europe. These European artists powerfully moved the native New York City painters and permitted them a more intimate understanding of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally seen as having begun with the pieces created by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning through the late forties and early 50s.
While acknowledging the variation of style in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be distinguished. One was action painting which is characterized by a loose, rapidfire, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in application partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock initially practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas to build up intricate and tangled skeins of paint into evocative and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning had highly vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to create richly coloured and textured images. Kline used dynamic, sweeping black strokes onto the white canvas for building starkly monumental forms.
The next field within Abstract Expressionism is exhibited by several varied styles beginning with the lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes seen in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the visibly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic paintings of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The last and least emotionally expressive field was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters made use of large spaces or dimensions of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to find quiet, subtle, almost meditative effects. The top colour-field painter was Rothko; the large part of his pieces consist of vast combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular spaces that tend to gleam and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism had a great influence on both the American and European art scenes in the fifties. Indeed, the movement marked the transition of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar years. Through the course of the fifties, the the young artists of the movement increasingly came under the trend of the colour-field painters. By the 1960s, the younger practitioners had largely moved away from the high extremity of the expressiveness of the action painters.
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