"Abstract Expressionism" was never a suitable title for the New York-based style that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. It was intended to include not just the work of painters who covered their canvases with fields of color and abstract forms, but also the work of painters who assaulted their canvases with a forceful gestural expressionism. Nonetheless, Abstract Expressionism has been the most widely recognized label for a collection of painters who shared many characteristics. All were devoted to art as self-expression, born of intense feeling and universal ideas, and the majority were inspired by the heritage of Surrealism, a movement that they adapted into a new style suitable for the post-war climate of worry and pain. With their success, these New York artists deposed Paris as the leader of modern art and laid the groundwork for America's supremacy of the worldwide art scene.
Key Ideas and Accomplishments
• In the 1930s, political unrest in Europe drew numerous notable Surrealists to New York, and many Abstract Expressionists were greatly impacted by Surrealism's emphasis on mining the unconscious. It sparked their fascination in myth and archetypal symbolism, and it formed their perception of painting as a conflict between self-expression and the chaos of the subconscious.
• The majority of Abstract Expressionist painters reached maturity in the 1930s. They were affected by the communist politics of the time and began to appreciate art based on personal experience. Few would retain their former extreme political ideas, but many would embrace the vocal avant-gardist demeanor.
• The Abstract Expressionists were eventually embraced as the first genuinely American avant-garde, having evolved as artists during a time when America was suffering economically and feeling culturally isolated and provincial. Their work was praised for being distinctly American in spirit - massive in size, romantic in tone, and evocative of a rugged individual independence.
• Although the movement has been largely portrayed in historical documentation as one belonging to the paint-splattered, heroic male artist, there were several important female Abstract Expressionists who emerged from New York and San Francisco during the 1940s and '50s who now receive credit as elemental members of the canon.
Beginnings
One of the great ironies of Abstract Expressionism is that its roots may be found in 1930s representational art. Almost all of the artists who went on to become abstract painters in New York in the 1940s and 1950s were impacted by the Great Depression, and they matured while painting in styles influenced by the Social Realism and Regionalist movements. By the late 1940s, most had abandoned such styles, but they had learnt a lot from their early work. It bolstered their dedication to an art form founded on personal experience. Time spent painting murals inspired them to produce abstract paintings on a similarly gigantic scale later on. Working for the government-sponsored Works Progress Administration also brought many diverse characters together, making it simpler for them to join together again when the new style was promoted in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, produced this "Cubism and Abstract Art" exhibit poster (1936)
In the 1930s, artists in New York benefited from an increasingly sophisticated network of institutions and galleries that hosted important exhibits of contemporary art. The Museum of Modern Art hosted exhibitions such as "Cubism and Abstract Art," "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism," and a significant Pablo Picasso retrospective. In 1939, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, subsequently renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, opened, boasting a major collection of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings.
In the 1930s and 1940s, many European modernists came to New York to escape political turmoil and conflict. Some, such as painter and instructor Hans Hofmann, would have a direct impact. Hofmann had spent the early years of the century in Paris, where he had encountered painters such as Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque, who had established gigantic names in New York artist circles. Through his thorough grasp of Cubism and admiration of Matisse's Fauvism, which was undervalued by many in New York, Hoffman was able to communicate many of these concepts to his students.
All of this activity meant that New York's artists were quite educated about contemporary European art trends. It left many people with sentiments of inferiority, which were gradually overcome in the 1940s. Personal interactions with numerous exiled Europeans, including André Breton, Salvador Dal, Arshile Gorky, Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, and André Masson, helped to remove part of their mythological reputation. As Europe suffered under totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and later became embroiled in war, many Americans felt emboldened to transcend European influence, to develop a painting rhetoric appropriate to their own nation, and, not least, to take the helm of advanced culture at a time when some of its oldest citadels were under threat. It was no coincidence that critic Clement Greenberg labelled the new style as "American-Type" Painting in one of his first significant replies to it.
Indeed, as author Mary Gabriel points out in ""Ninth Street Women": "It wouldn't have needed much thought to decide that works of art made before 1940 were no longer adequate to express the postwar society." Cubism's shattered planes foreshadowed the devastation inherent in war, but they were rendered obsolete by its advent. The Surrealists' dark terrors were astute musings on the unconscious during the advent of fascism. 'After the gas chambers... what is there left for the poor Surrealists to shock us with?'... poet Adrienne Rich wrote, 'radical change in human sensibility required radical changes in artistic style' - that was where artists in New York founded themselves immediately after the war, looking for a way to express their altered reality."
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