What is Abstract Art?
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Abstract Art is a vast movement in American painting that was instigated during the late 40s and turned into a dominating trend in Western painting in the fifties. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others 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 exhibited in New York City.
Though it is the commonly accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most accurate title of the works created by the aforementioned artists. Indeed, the movement consisted of numerous different painterly styles that changed in both technical skill and quality of form. Despite this variation, Abstract Expressionist paintings also share several broad elements. They are fundamentally abstract — meaning, they depict forms not taken from the outside world.
They furthermore emphasize open, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they exercise wide freedom of skill and procedure to reach this goal, with a particular importance exerted on the exploitation of the changeable physical nature of paint to evoke expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They display likewise emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive use of the paint in a process of artistic improvisation similar to the automatism of the Surrealists, with the comparable aim of demonstrating the strength of the creative subconcious in art. They exhibit the conscious rejection of regular structured composition found by application of discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a sole unified, undifferentiated field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Lastly, the paintings fill large canvases to create for the aforementioned visual elements both monumentality and engrossing power.
The premier Abstract Expressionists had two particular forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic shapes in a free, intricately linear and liquid paint process; and Hans Hofmann, who had dynamic and powerfully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally structured works. An early special influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the American shores in the late 1930s and early 40s of a troupe of Surrealists and other such European avant-garde artists fleeing the Nazis in Europe. Such artists greatly stimulated the native New York City painters and privileged for them a more detailed perspective of the vanguard of European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is now viewed as having started with the pieces done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late forties and early 50s.
While recognising the diversity of techniques of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be found. First was action painting which is indicated by a loose, speedy, dynamic, or strong handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in application largely dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint straight onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints on a raw canvas to create intricate and tangled skeins of paint into evocative and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning had highly vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build richly coloured and textured images. Kline utilised powerful, sweeping black strokes on white canvas to build starkly monumental forms.
The middle area of Abstract Expressionism is represented by a host of varied styles beginning with the lightly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic artworks of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The last and least emotionally expressive area was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large spaces or blocks of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to find quiet, subtle, almost meditative outcomes. The top colour-field painter was Rothko; many of his artworks consist of vast combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular spaces that tend to gleam and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism had a wide influence on both the American and European art circles in the fifties. Indeed, the movement instigated the transition of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City throughout the postwar time. Through the time of the 50s, the the youth of the movement increasingly came to the direction of the colour-field painters. By the sixties, the movement’s young practitioners had commonly drifted away from the great expressiveness of the action painters.
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