What is Abstract Art?

Abstract Art is a modern movement in American painting that started during the late forties and then turned into a predominant trend in Western painting in the 1950s. The premier American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. 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. Several of those worked, lived, or had galleries in New York City.

Although it is the commonly accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most apt title of the kind of artworks created by the aforementioned artists. Indeed, the movement was made up of several different painterly styles varying in both technical skill and quality of form. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings share several broad aspects. They are basically abstract — that is, they consist of forms that are not drawn from the real world.

They furthermore emphasize limitless, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they show vast freedom of skill and execution to create this goal, with particular emphasis focused on the manipulation of the malleable physical characteristic of paint to evoke expressive qualities (for example, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They show likewise emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive use of that paint in a type of psychic improvisation like the automatism of the Surrealists, with the similar intention of expressing the strength of the creative unconscious in art. They demonstrate the conscious abandonment of regular structured composition taken from discrete and segregable effects and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated grounds, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Lastly, the paintings fill large canvases to grant those aforementioned visual aspects both monumentality and engrossing might.

The earlier Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic figures in a free, intricately linear and liquid paint process; and Hans Hofmann, who had dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally composed pieces. An early and significant influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the US shores in the late 1930s and early 1940s of a host of Surrealists and important European avant-garde artists arriving from the rise of the Nazis in Europe. The avant-garde artists quickly moved the native New York City painters and allowed them an intimate understanding of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally regarded as having commenced with the art done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning during the late 1940s and early fifties.

With regard to the variety of techniques of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general approaches can be isolated. The first was action painting which is signified by a loose, rapid, dynamic, or powerful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in techniques in large part dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint right onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto the raw canvas building up multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into thrilling and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning utilised very vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline employed strong, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas creating starkly monumental forms.

The following field with Abstract Expressionism is exhibited by a host of varied styles from the highly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes of paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the visibly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic pictures of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The final and least emotionally expressive field was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large areas or fields of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to find quiet, subtle, almost meditative effects. The leading colour-field painter was Rothko; most of his pieces consist of wide combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular spaces that tend to glimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism had a great impact on both the American and European art worlds during the 50s. Indeed, the movement denoted the shift of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar decades. During the time of the 50s, the the younger artists of the movement increasingly came to the trend of the colour-field painters. By 1960, the younger artists had largely drifted away from the high expressiveness of the action painters.

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