![]() What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Physical evidence of the artist’s dynamic process of creation in the painting gave rise to critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 coining the term “action painting”: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. Meanwhile Lee Krasner and Franz Kline, were engaged in creating an art in which every inch of the canvas was fully charged to communicate a direct immediacy of the artist’s identity. We assert that the subject is critical.”īy 1947, Jackson Pollock had devised his radical new technique of dripping paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (actually this had its roots in the work of André Masson and Max Ernst) and Willem de Kooning was working on his own gestural style by alternating abstraction with iconic figurative images (Leftt: de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52). There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. “To us,” wrote Gottlieb and Rothko in an open letter to the New York Times in June 1943, “art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. Influenced by Jungian psychology, early works by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman (Right: Onement 1, 1948) sought to transform archaic motifs, seeming to create personal codes out of a collective unconscious without interference from conscious premeditation. Automatic Drawing, 1924).Įarly Abstract Expressionism turned to myth and primitive forms for inspiration. Surrealism had tried to tap the unconscious and break free of the conscious mind through, for example, psychic automatism that gave free rein to automatic gesture and improvisation (i.e. Expressionism, it will be recalled, seeks to articulate the inner feelings of the artist rather than the object of the art. Whereas traditional art depicts recognizable images, abstract art broke away from representation and – through exploring relationships of form and colour – sought to open new territory. They wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Troubled by the dark side of humanity revealed by war, young artists in America too were anxious about man’s irrationality and vulnerability. A few artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard remained in France and survived. Artists coming to America included Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, and Piet Mondrian. ![]() Many were Jewish or proponents of what Hitler called ‘degenerate’ art (Nazi art was mainly a kitch imitation of classical Greek and Roman art). This came about partly because European artists, writers, poets, collectors and dealers fled the Nazis during the 1930s, seeking safe haven in the United States. It is now applied exclusively to the first specifically American art movement to achieve international influence and which replaced Paris with New York as the centre of Modern Art. But in 1946 the American art critic Robert Coates (1897-1973) was the first to apply the term to an art movement developed in New York City in the 1940s in response to WWII. In the United States it was Alfred Barr who first used the term in a 1929 essay on Wassily Kandinsky. The term “ abstract expressionism” was first used in 1919 by the German magazine Der Sturm to label the (mainly ) German artistic response to WWI.
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