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Abstract Expressionism
The term first applied by his contemporaries to the early-2Oth-cen- tury paintings of the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, which express feeling and emotion through colour and nonobjective, or nonrepresentational, form; more recently, the term has been used to refer to the post-World War II paintings of a group of American artists that, by the 1950s, had become the dominant (but by no means the only) force in American art. The group includes Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Adolf Gottlieb, William Banotes, Clifford Still, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Bernard Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Tobey. Although it is the accepted designation, “Abstract Expressionism” is not an accurate description of the body of work created by these artists. For not all of it is abstract and not all is Expressionist, and, in fact, there are almost as many different styles as there are artists. The Abstract Expressionist movement is better characterized as an approach that involves complete freedom from all traditional aesthetic and social values in favour of a free, spontaneous personal expression. It represents a sharp contrast to the documentary approach of social realism (q.v.), which previously had dominated 20th-century American painting.
In spite of the diversity of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three very general approaches can be distinguished. One, called Action painting (q.v.) is characterized by a loose, rapid handling of paint in sweeping brushstrokes and in techniques partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas in a spontaneous manner reminiscent of the Automatic painting of the “organic Surrealists” (see Surrealism). In Action painting, the aesthetic accomplishment lies in the interaction between the artist and his materials; the act of painting, the moment of spontaneous creative activity, is more important than the finished work, which serves primarily as a notation of the instinctive process that had produced it and thus as a revelation of the artist’s inner creative forces. Pollock, the dean of Abstract Expressionism, first practiced Action painting by dripping commercial paints on raw canvas. De Kooning, many of whose works, like his series “Woman,” retain figurative images, uses extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes that require the use of the artist’s entire arm.
Kline’s paintings, consisting of powerful, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas are the nonobjective expressions of states of mind. Other important Action painters are Tworkov and Tomlin.
The works of another group of Abstract Expressionist painters are executed in a style that came to be known as Abstract Impressionism. Guston is the most notable of this group. His works, characterized by a more lyrical, less passionate imagery of bright colours and fluid shapes, are less spontaneous, more manipulated toward a preconceived end than the works of the Action painters.
A third approach encompassed within Abstract Expressionism involves the use of either well-defined abstract imags or large areas of pure colour in paintings whose surfaces are controlled to a considerable degree. The most prominent of the abstract imagists is Mother- well, whose paintings often consist of black ovoid shapes suspended between heavy black verticals on a white ground. Other major artists who painted in this mode are Still, Brooks, and Gottlieb and Baziotes, whose images are more expressive of specific, if sometimes obscure, ideas. The outstanding colour- field painter is Rothko, most of whose works consist of very large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to engulf the viewer. Newman and Reinhardt take a more intellectual approach to colour, delineating their stripes and rectangles with hard edges. Most of the artists of this third group of Abstract Expressionists, whether through colour, line, or shape, create a unique abstract image, a mysterious presence that, by its very simplicity, evokes complex responses. In the course of the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism increasingly followed the lead of this group and, by 1960, the movement was generally characterized by a rebellion against the impulsiveness of the more irrationally inspired Action painters.
Two major Abstract Expressionists who fit into none of these categories are Gorky, a former Surrealist and pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist movement, who uses undefined, suggestive biomorphic shapes for emotional impact, and Tobey, whose works include carefully controlled, luminous abstractions of outer space.
