Short answers, pulled from the story.
The art critic Robert Coates applied the term abstract expressionism to American art in 1946. This label emerged during a period when New York City had replaced Paris as the center of the Western art world.
Jackson Pollock revolutionized painting by placing unstretched raw canvas directly onto the floor. He attacked the surface from all four sides using artist materials and industrial house paint while moving rhythmically around linear skeins of dripped paint.
Helen Frankenthalier created her famous work Mountains and Sea in 1952. She pioneered this method by pouring thinned oil paint into raw canvas to produce large flat areas of color.
Abstract expressionism attracted attention from the CIA in the early 1950s according to arguments made since the mid-1970s. The agency saw the movement as representative of free thought and free markets within the United States.
Barnett Newman held his first solo show in 1948. He wrote catalogue forewords and reviews while becoming an exhibiting artist at Betty Parsons Gallery during that time.