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Abstract Expressionism was a term used by critics of Fine Art to describe a heterogeneous group of painters working in the late 1940s and early 1950s, loosely synonymous with the ‘New York School’. The name ‘abstract expressionism’ had first been used in connection with Kandinsky\'s abstract painting of the 1920s, and indicates the movement\'s interest in personal expression as opposed to the dominant geometric abstraction descended from Neoplasticism and Constructivism. It is this alone that allows artists of such widely divergent styles to be grouped together. They may, however, be subdivided into the lyrical abstraction, colour field paintings of Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko; the all-over, drip paintings of Jackson Pollock (which the critic Harold Rosenberg called ‘action painting’); and the figurative expressionism of Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann. The critic Clement Greenberg coined the term ‘American-style painting’ to describe these trends. The movement quickly won acceptance and placed American art on a forward footing, enabling the US to dictate the terms of the modernist debate. MG PD |
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