Abstract Art is a wide movement in American painting that was instigated around the late 40s and turned into a dominating trend in Western painting during the 50s. The leading American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others were 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 the artists worked, lived, or had galleries in New York City.

While it is the accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most apt name of the body of art created by the artists. In actual fact, the movement comprised lots of different painterly styles that differentiated in both skill and quality of application. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings possess many broad traits. They are basically abstract — meaning, they are based around forms which are not drawn from the outer world.

They furthermore master limitless, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exercise wide freedom of technical skill and execution to reach this outcome, with special emphasis pushed on the use of the variable physical nature of paint to call up expressive qualities (like, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They display the same kind of importance on the unstudied and intuitive use of the paint in a kind of artistic improvisation in the trend of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the comparable aim of showing the power of the creative unconscious in art. They display the conscious abandonment of regularly structured composition formed out of discrete and segregable aspects and their replacement with a sole unified, unchanged partition, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Finally, the paintings fill large canvases to give these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing strength.

The leading Abstract Expressionists had two iconic forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic forms with a free, delicately linear and liquid paint skill; and Hans Hofmann, who had dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally formed pieces. An early and particular influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the American shores in the late 30s and early forties of a whole host of Surrealists and important European avant-garde artists escaping from the Nazi party in Europe. These European artists forcefully impressed the native New York City painters and showed them a more detailed view of the vanguard of European art. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is commonly seen as having commenced with the pieces style by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning throughout the late 40s and early fifties.

With regard to the variation of techniques of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three broad approaches can be seen. The first was action painting which is characterized by a loose, quick, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in applications largely dictated by chance, for example dripping or spilling paint straight onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto the raw canvas creating multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into thrilling and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used especially vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to create richly coloured and textured images. Kline used strong, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas for building starkly monumental forms.

The second approach with Abstract Expressionism is demonstrated by many varied styles going from the lightly lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes found in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic artworks of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The final and least emotionally expressive area was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large spaces or fields of flat colour and thin diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative results. The top colour-field painter was Rothko; many of his artworks consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to glimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism cast a particular impact on both the American and European art scenes in the 1950s. Indeed, the movement initiated the change of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City through the postwar time. Through the period of the 1950s, the movement’s younger followers increasingly took to the style of the colour-field painters. By the 1960s, those young artists had largely drifted away from the extremity of the expressiveness of the action painters.

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