Abstract
Expressionism is a form of art in which the artist expresses
himself purely through the use of form and color. It is form of
non-representational, or non-objective, art, which means that
there are no concrete objects represented.
Now considered to be the first American artistic movement of
worldwide importance, the term was originally used to describe
the work of Arshile
Gorky, Willem
de Kooning,
and Jackson
Pollock.
The movement can be broadly divided into two groups: Action
Painting, typified by artists such as Pollock, de Kooning, Franz
Kline,
and Philip
Guston,
put the focus on the physical action involved in painting; Color
Field Painting, practiced by Mark
Rothko
and Kenneth
Noland,
among others, was primarily concerned with exploring the effect
of pure color on a canvas.
text is
taken from:
ARTCYCLOPEDIA - The Fine Art Search Engine
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/index.html
Abstract
Expressionism is often held as America_s most important
contribution to Modernism. Influenced by both Surrealism and
Analytic Cubism, the Abstract Expressionists synthesized
European trends in modern painting in order to create an
all-over technique that was quickly held to be emblematic of
American post-war culture, politics, and power. Finding the
enthusiastic support of formalist critic Clement Greenberg,
artists such as Jackson Pollock, Hans Hoffmann, Willem de
Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark
Rothko, and others rapidly came to be international cultural
ambassadors to
the United States, finally bestowing upon New York the title of
cultural capital of the world. While styles and approaches to
painting differed dramatically among individual artists, all the
Abstract Expressionists shared the experience of working for the
publicly sponsored WPA projects in the 1930s. They also had
toured and studied in Europe, learning from the avant-garde.
Despite its notoriety, Abstract Expressionism was a short-lived
movement, spanning the period from the end of the Second World
War to the early 1950s, when Greenberg turned his attention to a
younger, second generation of American
