Australian Travel

Abstract Art is a vast movement in American painting that came up in the late forties and then become a predominant 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. Many of those worked, lived, or had their work exhibited in New York City.

Though it is the general designation, Abstract Expressionism is not a proper description of the kind of art created by those artists. Actually, the movement was made up of various different painterly styles that were different in both technique and quality of work. Despite this area of difference, Abstract Expressionist paintings also share many broad traits. They are basically abstract — in effect, they are based around forms which are not drawn from the visible world.

They furthermore proffer free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exhibit high freedom of technique and execution to reach this goal, with importance pushed on the manipulation of the variable physical character of paint to call up expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They exhibit likewise importance on the unstudied and intuitive use of paint in a sort of internal improvisation like the automatism of the Surrealists, with the similar goal of displaying the influence of the creative unconscious in art. They display the conscious rejection of normally structured composition taken with discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated area, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Lastly, the paintings fill huge canvases to grant these aforementioned visual signs both monumentality and engrossing strength.

The early Abstract Expressionists had two particular forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic images using a free, lightly linear and liquid paint application; and Hans Hofmann, who made use of dynamic and powerfully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally composed pieces. Another early and important influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on Western shores in the late 30s and early 40s of a troupe of Surrealists and the European avant-garde artists coming from the Nazis in Europe. These artists powerfully influenced the native New York City painters and gave them a more detailed perspective of the vanguard of European artwork. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is commonly seen as having begun with the paintings done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning through the late 1940s and early 1950s.

With regard to the variation of technique in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be distinguished. First was action painting which is indicated by a loose, quick, dynamic, or strong handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in techniques in part dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas to create multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build richly coloured and textured images. Kline specialised in dynamic, sweeping black strokes on white canvas to build starkly monumental forms.

The second ground of Abstract Expressionism is represented by a host of varied styles beginning with the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the visibly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic pictures of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The last and least emotionally expressive ground was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large areas or dimensions of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative results. The leading colour-field painter was Rothko; many of his pieces consist of large combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular blocks that tend to shimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism had a great influence on both the American and European art circles during the 50s. Indeed, the movement initiated the shift of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City through the postwar decades. During the period of the fifties, the the younger participants of the movement increasingly took the leadership of the colour-field painters. By 1960, those younger artists had commonly drifted away from the high extremity of the expressiveness of the action painters.

If you’re looking for discount art supplies online including art canvas and easels, talk to the Discount Art Warehouse.