Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism was a movement in painting that emerged in New York in the 1940s and dominated advanced American art through the 1950s, the first internationally influential movement in Western painting to originate in the United States rather than Europe. It grouped painters working in sharply different manners under one banner: gestural, all-over painters such as Jackson Pollock, working directly on canvas laid flat on the floor, and Willem de Kooning, whose vigorous, often figurative brushwork retained a violent painterly energy; and color field painters such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who built large, meditative canvases from broad expanses of saturated color rather than gesture. What united the two strands was scale, ambition and a claim that abstract painting could carry the same weight of feeling and meaning previously claimed only for representational art. The movement's rise to international prominence during the early Cold War has itself become a subject of historical dispute: the mainstream account credits the work's own formal daring, while a documented dissenting account holds that American cultural diplomacy programs, including covertly CIA-linked touring exhibitions organized in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, actively promoted Abstract Expressionism abroad during the 1950s as evidence of Western artistic freedom against Soviet Socialist Realism.