What is Abstract Art?
Abstract Art is a vast movement in American painting that started around the late 1940s and then become a favoured trend in Western painting in the 50s. The most prominent 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. Several of these artists worked, lived, or had their work exhibited in New York City.
Despite the fact that it is the general designation, Abstract Expressionism is not an apt category of the body of art created by those artists. In actual fact, the movement had several different painterly styles that differentiated in both technical application and quality of expression. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings also possess many common traits. They are fundamentally abstract — i.e., they consist of forms that were not drawn from the visible world.
They furthermore master unrestricted, spontaneous, and individual emotional expression, and they show considerable freedom of skill and application to achieve this outcome, with a particular emphasis placed on the manipulation of the changeable physical nature of paint to evoke expressive qualities (like, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They lay the same emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of the paint in a kind of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with the likewise purpose of finding the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display the conscious ignorance of normally structured composition found with discrete and segregable effects and their replacement with a unique and unified, unchanged area, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill big canvases to grant those aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing power.
The leading Abstract Expressionists had two particular forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted esoteric biomorphic images with a free, intricately linear and liquid paint process; and Hans Hofmann, who had dynamic and fully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally composed paintings. Another early and key influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on US shores in the late thirties and early 1940s of a host of Surrealists and other important European avant-garde artists who fled the Nazi party in Europe. Those avant-garde artists greatly impressed the native New York City painters and permitted them a more intimate perspective of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is commonly considered as having commenced with the art mastered by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning throughout the late 40s and early 1950s.
With regard to the variation of techniques in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be found. One was action painting which is characterized by a loose, quick, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in applications largely dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas to create multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into evocative and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning employed extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline was known for strong, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas to build up starkly monumental forms.
The second approach of Abstract Expressionism is exhibited by numerous varied styles ranging from the highly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the visibly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic art of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The last and least emotionally expressive area was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters had large spaces or dimensions of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to find quiet, subtle, almost meditative results. The premier colour-field painter was Rothko; most of his paintings consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular spaces that tend to shimmer and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism had a special influence on both the American and European art styles throughout the 50s. Indeed, the movement sparked the transition of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City throughout the postwar period. During the course of the 50s, the the movement’s younger participants increasingly came to the leadership of the colour-field painters. By the sixties, these younger artists had largely shifted away from the highly charged expressiveness of the action painters.
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