Abstract Art is a wide movement in American painting that was first seen during the late 40s and then become a dominant trend in Western painting in the fifties. The top American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Some others included Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. The majority of those worked, lived, or had exhibitions in New York City.

Though it is the generally accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most apt label of the art created by the artists. Actually, the movement was made up of lots of different painterly styles that changed in both technical application and quality of form. Despite this variation, Abstract Expressionist paintings also share many wider traits. They are basically abstract — i.e., they consist of forms that are not drawn from the outside world.

They furthermore display limitless, spontaneous, and individual emotional expression, and they display wide freedom of technical skill and procedure to achieve this outcome, with special emphasis centred on the exploitation of the changeable physical character of paint to create expressive qualities (such as, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They lay likewise importance on the unstudied and intuitive use of that paint in a process of psychic improvisation in the manner of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the comparable intention of expressing the strength of the creative unconscious in art. They show the conscious abandonment of regular structured composition taken with discrete and segregable areas and their replacement with a sole unified, unvaried partition, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Lastly, the paintings fill huge canvases to grant those aforementioned visual elements both monumentality and engrossing power.

The first Abstract Expressionists had two particular forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensual biomorphic forms using a free, lightly linear and liquid paint technique; and Hans Hofmann, who made use of dynamic and powerfully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally constructed works. An early key influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the Western shores in the late thirties and early forties of a whole host of Surrealists and other important European avant-garde artists escaping from the Nazi party in Europe. Those avant-garde artists powerfully impressed the native New York City painters and permitted them a more detailed perspective of the vanguard of European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally viewed as having started with the painting created by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 40s and early fifties.

While recognising the differentiation of style of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three wide approaches can be seen. First was action painting which is characterized by a loose, quickfire, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in technique in large part dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint openly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas to build up intricate and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning had very vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline was known for dynamic, sweeping black strokes onto the white canvas to build starkly monumental forms.

The next approach within Abstract Expressionism is demonstrated by numerous varied styles starting from the lightly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes found in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the visibly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic art of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The final and least emotionally expressive ground was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large areas or blocks of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative works. The leading colour-field painter was Rothko; most of his paintings consist of wide combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular fields that tend to shine and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism cast a wide influence on both the American and European art circles during the fifties. Indeed, the movement instigated the transition of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City during the postwar decades. During the decade of the 1950s, the the movement’s younger participants increasingly came to the trend of the colour-field painters. By the sixties, those younger participants had generally moved away from the hot expressiveness of the action painters.

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