Abstract expressionism

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1952, the American critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that the canvas had begun to appear to one painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on it, he said, was not a picture but an event. This was the language that came to surround abstract expressionism, the art movement that emerged in the United States after World War II and won mainstream acceptance in the 1950s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence. It pulled the center of the Western art world away from Paris and planted it in New York City. The artists gathered under its name painted in wildly different ways. Some flung and dripped paint across raw canvas on the floor. Others laid down serene, shimmering blocks of color and denied their work was abstract at all. So how did a group of painters with so little in common end up sharing one label? Why did total abstraction feel safe in an era of censorship? And who decided this was the best painting of its day?

• 2. Naming The Unnameable

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  The phrase abstract expressionism is believed to have first appeared in Germany in 1919, in the magazine Der Sturm, where it described German Expressionism. Alfred Barr borrowed it in 1929 to describe works by Wassily Kandinsky. It crossed to American art only in 1946, when the critic Robert Coates used it in a review of 18 Hans Hofmann paintings.

  Robert Coates was naming something that resisted a single definition. The term came to be applied to any number of artists working mostly in New York who had quite different styles. It was even attached to work that was neither especially abstract nor especially expressionist. The movement carried an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and, some felt, nihilistic.

  The California painter Jay Meuser, who worked in a non-objective style, captured the spirit in a note on his painting Mare Nostrum. He wrote that it is far better to capture the glorious spirit of the sea than to paint all of its tiny ripples. That impulse, to seize a feeling rather than a likeness, ran beneath even the movement's most opposite extremes.

• 3. Refugees And A New Capital

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  During the years leading up to and through World War II, modernist artists, writers, collectors, and dealers fled Europe and the Nazi onslaught for safety in the United States. Many who did not flee perished. Among those who reached New York, some with help from Varian Fry, were Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, and Piet Mondrian. Picasso, Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard remained in France and survived.

  In Paris, formerly the center of European culture, the climate for art after the war was a disaster, and New York took its place. Two eminent teachers shaped the young Americans: Hans Hofmann from Germany and John D. Graham from Ukraine. Graham's influence showed in the work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart.

  Gorky is counted among the founding fathers of the movement. His mature paintings, such as The Liver Is the Cock's Comb and One Year the Milkweed, prefigured what was coming. One account holds that he lit the way for two generations of American artists. Hofmann left his own mark through students, including Lee Krasner, who introduced her teacher to her husband, Jackson Pollock.

• 4. The Floor As Arena

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  During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock laid unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides. He dripped and threw linear skeins of paint, using both artist materials and industrial materials. The technique had roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

  Harold Rosenberg coined the term action painting in 1952 to describe this shift. For him the finished canvas was only a residue, the physical trace of the real work, which lived in the act of creation itself. The painter would sometimes let paint fall according to the subconscious mind, rhythmically dancing or even standing in the canvas, letting the unconscious part of the psyche assert itself.

  Not every action painter dripped. Franz Kline focused on the brushstroke and the canvas itself, as in his painting Number 2 from 1954. Willem de Kooning turned to the figure in his violent and grotesque Women series. He began Woman I in June 1950 and reworked it until early 1952, when he abandoned it unfinished. The art historian Meyer Schapiro saw it in the studio and urged him to persist, and de Kooning answered by starting three more paintings on the same theme.

• 5. Fields Of Pure Color

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  Mark Rothko's serenely shimmering blocks of color belong to what Clement Greenberg termed the Color Field direction. Rothko denied his work was abstract, yet it sits firmly inside the movement alongside Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb.

  The Color Field painters sought to rid their art of superfluous rhetoric. They eliminated recognizable imagery and used a highly articulated, psychological approach to color. Where the action painters left gestural marks, these artists effaced the individual mark in favor of large, flat areas of color. Barnett Newman pushed this toward the monumental, and his masterpiece Vir heroicus sublimis entered the collection of MoMA.

  The technique of staining opened a bridge between the camps. In 1952 Helen Frankenthaler, having seen Pollock's thinned black oil stained into raw canvas, produced her own stain paintings in varied oil colors. Her most famous from that period is Mountains and Sea. In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland visited her studio, saw the painting unrolled on the floor, and returned to Washington, DC, to build the color field movement of the late 1950s.

• 6. The Critics Who Crowned Them

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  Clement Greenberg, a New York Trotskyist and long-time critic for the Partisan Review and The Nation, became the loudest champion of the new painting. He proclaimed abstract expressionism, and Pollock in particular, as the epitome of aesthetic value. He placed Pollock at the end of a tradition running through Cubism and Cézanne back to Monet, in which painting grew ever purer and more concentrated on marks made on a flat surface.

  The critics divided the artists among themselves. Greenberg advocated Pollock and the Color Field painters such as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Harold Rosenberg preferred the action painters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, along with the seminal paintings of Arshile Gorky. Thomas B. Hess, managing editor of ARTnews, championed de Kooning. These new critics often elevated their protégés by casting other artists as followers, or by ignoring them.

  Some artists held the pen themselves. Barnett Newman wrote catalogue forewords and reviews and had his first solo show in 1948. At one of the Artists' Sessions at Studio 35 he said that they were in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in their own image. Not every voice was friendly. The New York Times critic John Canaday was among the most vocal opponents of the whole enterprise.

• 7. Apolitical By Design

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  American social realism had been the mainstream of the 1930s, shaped by the Great Depression and by the Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. The political climate after World War II would not long tolerate the social protests of those painters.

  The McCarthy era brought artistic censorship to the United States. Totally abstract subject matter offered an escape. If a painting carried no recognizable message, it could be seen as apolitical, and therefore safe. If a work was political, the meaning was largely reserved for insiders. Robert Motherwell's series Elegy to the Spanish Republic addressed political issues through powerful black and white paintings of gesture, surface, and symbol.

  Since the mid-1970s a further claim has circulated. It holds that in the early 1950s the style drew the attention of the CIA, which saw it as proof of the United States as a haven of free thought and free markets, and as a challenge to the socialist realist styles of communist nations. Frances Stonor Saunders detailed this in her book The Cultural Cold War, describing promotion of the painters through the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967. Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, pushed back in an essay called Revisiting the Revisionists, arguing that much of that account is false or decontextualized.

• 8. What Came After

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  By the early 1960s the cultural reign of abstract expressionism in the United States had diminished. Younger artists rejected its emphasis on individualism, and that rejection gave rise to Pop art and Minimalism. Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein rose to prominence, with Richard Hamilton in Britain. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns formed a bridge between the old movement and Pop. Donald Judd, Robert Mangold, and Agnes Martin defined the Minimalist response.

  The influence traveled across the Atlantic as well. The Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, a member of the Montreal group Les Automatistes, helped carry a related style of abstract impressionism to Paris from 1949. Michel Tapié's 1952 book Un Art Autre proved enormously influential, and Tapié promoted the works of Pollock and Hans Hofmann in Europe.

  The recovery of overlooked figures became part of the story too. Art historians such as Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, and Catherine de Zegher showed that pioneer women artists who had produced major innovations had been left out of the official history. Many of them finally began to win long overdue recognition in the wake of the movement of the 1940s and 1950s. In 1958 Mark Tobey became the first American painter since Whistler in 1895 to win top prize at the Venice Biennale, a measure of how far American art had carried.