Abstract Expressionism

About

In January 1951 Life magazine ran a photograph of fifteen unsmiling artists who had protested against the Metropolitan Museum's attitude to contemporary art. These Irascibles included most of the painters now grouped under Abstract Expressionism, the first American movement to shape art internationally.

Many had worked on Depression-era federal art projects and absorbed Surrealist automatism from European artists exiled in New York during the war. By 1950 their solutions differed widely. Jackson Pollock poured and flung paint across canvases laid on the floor, as in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950); Willem de Kooning slashed a figure into being in Woman I (1950–52); Franz Kline built stark black structures; Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell built dense, rhythmic surfaces. Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still instead spread colour across huge areas. Look for scale that surrounds the viewer and visible process. Pop Art and Minimalism later defined themselves against it.