What is Abstract Art?
Abstract Art is a wide movement in American painting that showed up in the late 40s and then was a dominating trend in Western painting throughout the 1950s. The premier 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 commonly accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most apt description of the kind of art created by the artists. In actual fact, the movement was made up of numerous different painterly styles varying in both skill and quality of method. Despite this area of difference, Abstract Expressionist paintings also possess a number of common aspects. They are basically abstract — that is to say, they show forms that are not assumed from the outer world.
They furthermore emphasize open, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they display vast freedom of technical skill and application to attain this result, with a special emphasis laid on the use of the variable physical character of paint to create expressive qualities (such as, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They show similar importance on the unstudied and intuitive use of the paint in a form of internal improvisation like the automatism of the Surrealists, with the comparable purpose of demonstrating the influence of the creative subconcious in art. They display the neglect of commonly structured composition taken by application of discrete and segregable effects and their replacement with a sole unified, unvaried area, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Finally, the paintings fill big canvases to give such aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing strength.
The early Abstract Expressionists had two original forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted esoteric biomorphic figures using a free, lightly linear and liquid paint skill; and Hans Hofmann, who made use of dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally constructed works. An early particular influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the American shores in the late 30s and early 1940s of a troupe of Surrealists and important European avant-garde artists arriving from the rise of the Nazis in Europe. These avant-garde artists greatly stimulated the native New York City painters and allowed them a more detailed insight of the vanguard of European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is now viewed as having been initiated with the art created by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 1940s and early fifties.
While recognising the variation of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be isolated. First was action painting which is indicated by a loose, quickfire, dynamic, or powerful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in application largely dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling paint straight onto the canvas. Pollock initially practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints on a raw canvas to build up multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into evocative and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning employed extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes building up richly coloured and textured images. Kline used mighty, sweeping black strokes onto the white canvas for building starkly monumental forms.
The next area of Abstract Expressionism is displayed by a number of 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 final and least emotionally expressive area was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large spaces or dimensions of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative results. The top colour-field painter was Rothko; the majority of his works consist of large combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to gleam and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism cast a particular influence on both the American and European art worlds in the 50s. Indeed, the movement sparked the change of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City during the postwar time. During the decade of the 50s, the the movement’s younger participants increasingly heeded the lead of the colour-field painters. By 1960, the movement’s young artists had mostly shifted away from the high voltage expressiveness of the action painters.