Abstract Expressionism

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Abstract Expressionism



Abstract Expressionism is a modern art movement that flowered in America after the Second World War and held power until the dawn of Pop Art in the1960's. With this movement New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. Abstract Expressionism has its roots in other earlier 20th century art movements such as Cubism and Surrealism that promoted abstraction rather than representation. The psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Carl Jung provided the intellectual context in this quest for new subject matter.
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.
This movement of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the mid-1940s and attained singular prominence in American art in the following decade; also called action painting and the New York school. It was the first important school in American painting to declare its independence from European styles and to influence the development of art abroad. “Arshile Gorky first gave impetus to the movement. His paintings, derived at first from the art of Picasso, Miró, and surrealism, became more personally expressive. Jackson Pollock's turbulent yet elegant abstract paintings, which were created by spattering paint on huge canvases placed on the floor, brought abstract expressionism before a hostile public. Willem de Kooning's first one-man show in 1948 established him as a highly influential artist. His intensely complicated abstract paintings of the 1940s were followed by images of Woman, grotesque versions of buxom womanhood, which were virtually unparalleled in the sustained savagery of their execution.” Other important artists were Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell. A painter such as Philip Guston and Franz Kline turned to the abstract late in...