Classic Colors: Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world.

Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of Max Ernst. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all over" look of Pollock's drip paintings.

Mark Rothko

Willem de Kooning

The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even applied to work which is not especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic "action paintings", with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning (which are figurative paintings) and to the rectangles of color in Mark Rothko's, Color Field paintings (which is not what would usually be called expressionist and which Rothko denied was abstract), yet all three are classified as abstract expressionists.

Hans Hoffmann

Ann Ryan

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Barnett Newman

Arshile Gorky

Clyfford still

Clyfford still

Franz Kline

And make sure you waste some time over at the Jackson Pollock page because it is lots of fun.

"Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature." - Rothko

Text quoted from wikipedia.