The Term New York School Refers to a Postwar Art Movement That

The Development of Abstract Expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American, mail service–World War II art movement.

Learning Objectives

Explain the abstract expressionist motility of the 1940s

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Abstract expressionism has an image of existence rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In do, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even to work that is neither particularly abstract nor expressionist.
• Although it is truthful that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it.
• Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the employ of big canvases and an all-over approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance.

Key Terms

• New York School: The New York School (synonymous with abstract expressionist painting) was an informal grouping of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City.

Abstract Expressionism Overview

Abstract expressionism was an American mail–Earth State of war Ii fine art movement. Although the term abstract expressionism was first applied to American fine art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been used previously in Germany's Der Sturm magazine in 1919.

Abstract expressionism is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-deprival of the German expressionists with the anti-figurative artful of the European abstract schools, such as futurism, the Bauhaus, and synthetic cubism. Additionally, information technology has an image of beingness rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists who worked (more often than not) in New York during the 1940s.

Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century, such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists' works, in reality virtually of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. In many instances, abstract art implied the expression of ideas that business organisation the spiritual, the unconscious, and the mind.

Characteristics of Abstract Expressionist Painting

Abstruse expressionism expanded and adult the definitions and possibilities that artists had available in the creation of new works of fine art. Although abstruse expressionism spread apace throughout the U.s.a., the major centers of this mode were New York and California. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the apply of large canvases and an all-over approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the centre beingness of more interest than the edges).

No. 5: Jackson Pollock is known for his techniques in action painting, a style of abstract expressionism in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being advisedly applied, equally seen in this painting washed in 1948.

Jackson Pollock's energetic action paintings, with their busy feel, are different both technically and aesthetically from the fierce and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning. In contrast to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks of Pollock and de Kooning, the color-field painters initially appeared to exist cool and austere, eschewing the individual marker in favor of big, flat areas of color, which these artists considered to exist the essential nature of visual brainchild, along with the actual shape of the canvas. In later years, color-field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive, admitting in a dissimilar way from gestural abstract expressionism.

New York

During the flow leading upwards to and during World War Two, modernist artists, writers, and poets, equally well as important collectors and dealers, fled Europe and the onslaught of the Nazis for safe oasis in the United States. New York replaced Paris as the new center of the art earth.

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism—a modernist motion that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, Joan Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early on Modernism via the bang-up teachers who arrived in America, like Hans Hofmann from Frg and John D. Graham from Russian federation.

Graham's influence on American fine art during the early 1940s was particularly visible in the piece of work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Gorky'south contributions to American and world fine art are difficult to overestimate. His works—such as The Liver is the Cock's Comb, The Betrothal II, and 1 Year the Milkweed—immediately prefigured abstract expressionism.

Jackson Pollock

During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all contemporary art that followed him. To some extent, Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself.

Pollock redefined what it was to produce art. His motion abroad from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all that came subsequently. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock'due south process—the placing of unstretched raw canvas on the floor where information technology could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials—essentially took making art beyond any prior boundary.

Jackson Pollock and Activeness Painting

Action painting, created by Jackson Pollock, is a style in which pigment is spontaneously splattered, smeared, or dripped onto the sail.

Learning Objectives

Describe Jackson Pollock'south method of action painting

Key Takeaways

Primal Points

• Action painting was developed as part of the abstruse expressionism movement that took identify in postal service–World War II America, especially in New York, during the 1940s through until the early 1960s.
• Action painting places the emphasis on the act of painting rather than the final work as an artistic object.
• Jackson Pollock challenged traditional conventions of painting by using synthetic, resin-based paints, laying his canvas on the flooring, and using hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes to apply paint.

Key Terms

• abstract: Fine art that does not depict objects in the natural earth, only instead uses color and form in a non-representational manner.
• aesthetic: Concerned with beauty, artistic touch, or advent.

Action Painting

Activity painting is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvas, rather than existence carefully applied with a brush. The resulting piece of work ofttimes emphasizes the physical act of painting itself equally an essential attribute of the finished work.

Action painting is inextricably linked to abstruse expressionism, a school of painting popular in post-World War Ii America that was characterized by the view that art is non-representational and importantly improvisational. The major artists associated with this movement are Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, among others.

The term action painting was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 in his essay The American Action Painters, signaling a major shift in the artful perspective of the New York School painters and critics. According to Rosenberg, the canvas was not an object, only rather "an loonshit in which to act. "

Rosenberg's critique shifted the emphasis from the object to the struggle of painting itself, with the finished work being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art, which was in the process of the painting'southward creation.

Activeness painting refers to the spontaneous activity that was the action of the painter—through arm and wrist movement, painterly gestures— and led to pigment that was thrown, splashed, stained, splattered, poured, and dripped. The painter would sometimes let the paint baste onto the canvas while rhythmically dancing or even while standing on top of the unstretched canvass laying on the flooring—both techniques invented past one of the most important abstract expressionists: Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock

My painting does not come from the easel. I adopt to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more office of the painting, since this manner I can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting.

Born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, Jackson Pollock moved to New York Urban center in 1930, where he studied nether Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York. In 1948 he married the American painter Lee Krasner, and they moved to what is now known as the Pollock-Krasner Firm and Studio in the Springs area of Due east Hampton, Long Island, NY.

The Pollock Barn: Pollock'due south studio in Springs, New York.

Materials and Process

After his move to Springs, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, turning to synthetic, resin-based paints chosen alkyd enamels. These were much more fluid than traditional paint and, at that time, were a novel medium. Pollock described his use of household paints, instead of fine art paints, every bit "a natural growth out of a need."

He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Past defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension past being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions—the term all-over painting has been used to draw some of his work, besides as the work of other artists from that time.

In the process of making paintings in this manner, he moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. In addition, he also moved abroad from the use of simply the hand and wrist, since he used his whole torso to paint.

Jackson Pollock in his studio: The creative person threw, splashed, stained, splattered, poured, and dripped pigment to create his works.

Titles with Numbers

Pollock wanted an terminate to the search for figurative elements in his paintings, so he abased titles and started numbering his paintings instead. The numbering relates to the fashion composers title their works. Furthering the musical metaphor, Pollock'southward activity paintings have been often described as improvisational works of art, like to how jazz musicians approach the operation of a slice.

Expiry

At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip fashion and by 1951 his works had turned darker in colour. This was followed by a return to color, and he reintroduced figurative elements. During this period Pollock moved to a more commercial gallery and at that place was great demand from collectors for his new paintings.

In response to this pressure level, along with personal frustration, his long-term trouble with alcoholism worsened. He painted his 2 final works in 1955. On Baronial xi, 1956, Pollock died in a single-machine crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving under the influence of alcohol.

After Pollock'south demise at age 44, his widow, Lee Krasner, managed his estate and ensured that Pollock's reputation remained stiff despite changing fine art-world trends. They are both buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Island, NY.

Color-Field Painting

Color-field painting can be recognized by its big fields of solid color spread across or stained into the canvas to create areas of unbroken surface and a apartment picture airplane.

Learning Objectives

Differentiate colour-field painting from other contemporary abstract art such every bit abstract expressionism

Cardinal Takeaways

Fundamental Points

• Color-field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York Urban center during the 1950s and 1960s. Information technology is closely linked to abstract expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, and lyrical abstraction.
• Distinct from the emotional energy and gestural surface marks and paint handling seen in the piece of work of abstract expressionists similar Jackson Pollock, color-field painting came beyond as cool and austere.
• The motility places less accent on gesture, brushstrokes, and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process, with color itself becoming the bailiwick thing.
• Marking Rothko, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Morris Louis are amongst the many artists who used color-field techniques in their work.
• Color-field painters revolutionized the manner paint could be effectively practical, through their utilize of acrylic paint and techniques such equally staining and spraying.

Key Terms

• abstruse expressionism: An American genre of modernistic art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstract forms.
• activity painting: A genre of modern fine art in which the pigment is dribbled, splashed, or poured onto the sail to obtain a spontaneous and totally abstract image.
• lyrical abstraction: A type of abstract painting related to abstract expressionism; in use since the 1940s.

Color-Field Painting

Color-field painting is a fashion of abstruse painting that emerged in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists.

Colour-field is characterized primarily by its use of large fields of flat, solid color spread beyond or stained into the canvas to create areas of unbroken surface and a flat flick airplane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes, and activity than abstract expressionism, favoring instead an overall consistency of course and procedure, with color itself condign the subject affair.

Encompassing several decades from the mid-20th century through the early 21st century, the history of  color-field painting can be separated into iii separate but related generations of painters:

1. Abstract expressionism.
2. Post-painterly abstraction.
3. Lyrical abstraction.

Some of the artists fabricated works in all iii eras that relate to all of the three styles.

Cloudless Greenberg

The focus of attention in the contemporary art world began to shift from Paris to New York later on Earth War II and the development of American Abstruse Expressionism. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cloudless Greenberg was the first art critic to suggest and identify a dichotomy between differing tendencies within the abstract expressionist canon—especially between action painting and what Greenberg termed post-painterly abstraction (today known as colour-field).

Color-Field Formats

By the late 1950s and early on 1960s, young artists began to pause away stylistically from abstract expressionism, experimenting with new means of treatment pigment and color. Moving abroad from the gesture and angst of action painting towards flat, clear picture planes and a seemingly calmer language, color-field artists used formats of stripes, targets, and simple geometric patterns to concentrate on color as the dominant theme their paintings.

Color-field painting initially referred to a item blazon of abstract expressionism, exemplified especially in the work of Marker Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and several series of paintings by Joan Miró.

Color-field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric and gesture. Artists similar Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Friedel Dzubas, and Frank Stella often used greatly reduced formats, simplified or regulated systems, and bones references to nature to draw the focus of the painting to colour, and the interactions of colour, every bit the most important element.

Harran II: During the tardily 1950s and early 1960s, Frank Stella was a significant effigy in the emergence of minimalism, postal service-painterly abstraction, and color-field painting. His shaped canvases of the 1960s revolutionized abstract painting, such every bit this ane from 1967.

Beginning: This color-field painting is characterized by unproblematic geometric forms and repetitive, regulated systems. Information technology was painted by Kenneth Noland in 1958.

Who's Afraid of Red, Yellowish and Blue?: The apartment, solid motion-picture show plane that is typical of colour-field paintings is evident in this 1966 piece by Barnet Newman, where the color ruby takes centre stage.

An important distinction between color-field painting and abstruse expressionism is the way paint is handled. The most bones defining technique of painting is the application of pigment, and the color-field painters revolutionized the way paint could be effectively applied.

Water-soluble, artist-quality acrylic paints first became commercially available in the early 1960s, coinciding with the colour-field movement. The most common applications were:

• Stain painting, where artists mix and dilute their paint in buckets or java cans to go far a more fluid liquid, and then pour information technology onto raw, unprimed canvas and draw shapes and areas every bit they stain.
• Spray painting, a technique using a spray gun to create large expanses and fields of colour sprayed across the sheet.
• The use of stripes.

Color-field painting initially appeared to be cool and austere due to these methods of handling paint that tended to eschew the individual mark of the creative person. However, color-field painting has proven to exist both sensual and securely expressive, albeit in a dissimilar way from gestural abstract expressionism.

Big A: Jack Bush was a color-field painter who used geometric, simple forms to highlight the pure interaction of color, as tin be seen in this 1968 work.

The New York School

The New York School was an informal group of American abstruse painters and other artists that was active in the 1950s and 1960s.

Learning Objectives

Explicate what the New York School is known for and who its proponents were

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• The New York School was an informal grouping of abstruse painters and other artists in NYC though it has become associated most with the abstract expressionist motion. Although abstruse expressionism spread speedily throughout the U.s., the major centers of this style were New York Urban center and California.
• New York School artists drew inspiration from surrealism and contemporary fine art movements such every bit action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, and experimental music.
• The piece of work of the New York Schoolhouse was documented through annual exhibitions of painting and sculpture from 1951–1957, nigh notably in the 9th Street Art Exhibition.
• In improver to painting, the New York School was associated with many poets, dancers, composers, jazz musicians, and writers.

Key Terms

• surrealism: An creative movement and an artful philosophy, pre-dating abstract expressionism, that aims for the liberation of the mind by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the hidden.
• GI Nib: The Servicemen'due south Readjustment Act of 1944, known informally as the GI Bill, was a law that provided a range of benefits for returning World War Two veterans (commonly referred to as GIs).
• abstruse expressionism: An American genre of modern art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstruse forms.

The New York School

The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians that was agile in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. Information technology represented, and is oftentimes synonymous with, the fine art motion of aAbstract expressionism, such as the work of Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning.

The artists of the New York School drew their inspiration from surrealism and other contemporary, avant-garde art movements, in particular action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City fine art globe'southward vanguard circle.

No. 5: Jackson Pollack is known for his techniques in action painting, a mode of abstruse expressionism in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than carefully applied, such equally this one done in 1948.

Woman V: Willem de Koonig was an influential abstract expressionist painter.

Abstract Expressionism

A school of painting that flourished later World War II until the early 1960s, abstract expressionism is characterized by the view that art is non-representational and chiefly improvisational. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, and an all-over approach whereby the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges). The canvass as the arena became a credo of activeness painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a ideology of the color-field painters.

The post-Globe State of war II era benefited some of the artists who were recognized early on past art critics. Some artists from New York, such as Norman Bluhm and Sam Francis, took advantage of the GI Nib and left for Europe, to return later with acclaim.

Many artists from all beyond the U.Due south. arrived in New York Metropolis to seek recognition, and by the end of the decade the list of artists associated with the New York Schoolhouse had greatly increased. Painters, sculptors, and printmakers created art that was termed action painting, fluxus, colour-field painting, difficult-edge painting, pop art, minimal art and lyrical abstraction, among other styles and movements associated with abstract expressionism.

9th Street Fine art Exhibition

The 9th Street Art Exhibition was held on May 21–June x, 1951. It was a historical, ground-breaking exhibition that gathered a number of notable artists, and information technology was the stepping-out of the post-war New York avant-garde, collectively known as the New York School.

The show was hung by Leo Castelli, as he was liked by most of the artists and idea of as someone who would hang the exhibition without favoritism. The opening of the show was a groovy success. According to the critic, historian, and curator Bruce Altshuler, "It appeared every bit though a line had been crossed, a step into a larger art world whose future was bright with possibility."

Interdisciplinary Influences in the New York School

In addition to painting, the New York School was associated with many poets, dancers, composers, jazz musicians, and writers. Poets drew on inspiration from surrealism and the contemporary advanced fine art movements, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York City art world like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

In the 1960s, the work of the avant-garde minimalist composers La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley became prominent in the New York art world. The new bebop and cool jazz musicians in the 1940s and 1950s (such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Gerry Mulligan) coincided with the New York School and abstract expressionism.

There are too commonalities among the New York School and members of the shell-generation poets who were active in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in New York Urban center, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Southward. Burroughs, Diane Wakoski, and several others.

Abstract Expressionist Sculpture

During the postwar catamenia, many sculptors made work in the prevalent styles of the time: abstract expressionism, minimalism and pop art.

Learning Objectives

Evaluate how sculpture from 1945–1970 was influenced past abstract expressionism, minimalism, and pop art

Key Takeaways

Central Points

• Abstruse expressionist sculpture was greatly influenced by surrealism and its emphasis on spontaneous or hidden creation.
• Minimalist sculptures often set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through the elimination of all non-essential forms or concepts. These works are often characterized by geometric, cubic forms, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and the apply of industrial materials.
• The sculptors Claes Oldenburg and George Segal were important proponents of pop art in their use of found-objects and how they reproduced everyday commercial objects equally fine fine art.

Cardinal Terms

• pop art: An art movement that emerged in the 1950s, that presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular civilization such as advert, news, etc.
• establish object: A natural object, or one manufactured for some other purpose, considered as part of a work of art.

Abstract Expressionism and Sculpture

While Abstract Expressionism is most closely associated with painting, a number of sculptors were integral to the motion as well. David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, Ibram Lassaw, Theodore Roszak, Phillip Pavia, Mary Callery, Richard Stankiewicz, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson in item were considered to exist important members of the movement.

Similar to abstruse expressionist painting, sculptural piece of work from the movement was greatly influenced by surrealism and its accent on spontaneous or subconscious creation. Abstruse expressionist sculpture, like painting from the motion, was more interested in process than product, which can make it difficult to visually distinguish works by aesthetics alone, so it is important to have into account what the creative person has to say almost their procedure.

The sculptures of David Smith, for example, sought to express two-dimensional subjects that had never before been shown in three dimensions. His work blurred the distinctions betwixt sculpture and painting, generally making use of delicate tracery rather than solid grade, with a two-dimensional appearance that contradicted the traditional idea of sculpture in the round.

Ancient Household: David Smith was an important abstract expressionist sculptor.

Minimalism

Minimalism during the 1960s and 1970s was a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of abstruse expressionism that dominated the previous decades. Minimalist artists explicitly stated that their art was not nearly self-expression. Instead, Minimalist works often set out to betrayal the essence or identity of a subject area through the elimination of all not-essential forms or concepts.

These works are often characterized by geometric, cubic forms, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and the apply of industrial materials. Some prominent artists who worked with sculpture and were associated with minimalism (though not all agreed with the association) include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Anthony Caro, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin.

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin was an American minimalist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. The lack of the marking of the artist's hand in these cases speak to the notion of exposing the true form of the sculptural object, a significant tenet of the minimalist motion.

Donald Judd

Donald Judd, who disavowed the term minimalism, and preferred to refer to his sculptures equally specific objects, used unproblematic, repeated forms to explore infinite. His works were often made (rather than sculpted) out of metals, industrial plywood and physical, and therefore defied easy classification as sculpture.

Judd's "Untitled," 1977, applies the simplicity and geometric course typical of minimalist works. Fabricated from concrete, the piece comes across equally potentially industrially created as it lacks the mark of the creative person'south hand that is then often seen in works of art, favoring instead a cool austerity that highlights the qualities of the class and the material used to fabricate it.

Untitled: Donald Judd, who disavowed the term minimalism, preferred to refer to his sculptures as specific objects. Judd uses simple, repeated forms to explore infinite.

Pop Art

There were numerous artists working in sculpture who were associated with the pop art motility. Two important examples are Claes Oldenburg and George Segal.

Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg began his artistic do every bit part of a grouping of artists reacting to Abstract Expressionism'south sublime gestures with figural drawings and papier mache sculptures. His artistic trajectory took him from making found-object paintings littered with urban debris to plaster sculptures of everyday commercial and manufactured objects. He later on created sculptures of similar subjects on larger and larger scales, first sewing soft sculptures out of canvas, then turning to large outdoor monuments in public spaces.

George Segal

George Segal, another artist associated with the pop-fine art movement, was all-time known for his life-size figures made from plaster and bandage casts. These figures, ofttimes left with minimal color and detail and given a ghostly, hollow advent, inhabited tableaux constructed of plant objects such every bit a street corner, a bus, or a diner.

Common practices seen in popular-art sculptural piece of work include the brandish of found art objects, the representation of consumer appurtenances, the placing of typical non-fine art objects within a gallery setting, and the abstraction of familiar objects. Nosotros tin can run into this brainchild in such works as Plug past Oldenburg.

This reproduction of a familiar or mundane object is displayed at such an increased size that the bailiwick matter becomes abstracted, its original part simultaneously altered and highlighted.

Plug: Claes Oldenburg produced oversized reproductions of familiar objects in increased sizes to abstract the subject matter, such as this one done in 1970.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/abstract-expressionism/

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