ABSTRACT
This composite term was one of several coined to identify the work of a number of fairly loosely-associated artists based in the US and active from the late 1940s. It is important to note, however, that this, the most successful – that is, used – name (coined by the critic Robert Coates in 1946) was not the invention of any of the artists themselves, nor did they endorse it as an accurate description of their activities and interests. Five of the key artists identified as American abstract^ expressionists – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning – were resident in New York, a metropolitan centre that had become home to many European modernist artists in the 1930s who had gone there to escape the nazis and coming war in Europe. Surrealist artists in particular, such as Joan Miro´ and Andre´ Masson, are credited with influencing in a number of important ways the chief ideas, technical procedures, and stylistic concerns of some of the abstract expressionists, though a very much wider range of artistic and socio^-cultural sources may be detected in the development of these artists’ work, including psychoanalytic^ theories, Greek and Roman myths, Jewish theology, anthropological discourse, Native American totemic sculpture and religion, as well as art by ‘the European Greats’ of the inter-war period – particularly Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and the aforementioned abstract (that is, non-figurative) surrealist painters. Most artists identified as abstract expressionists after 1945 had been
committed to forms of social^ realism or socialist realism in the 1930s during the Depression and New Deal period in the US, having then embraced liberal-left or communist political beliefs associated with varying degrees of support for the USSR. With the revelations of Joseph Stalin’s purges of his opposition there in the later 1930s, the rise of anti-communism in the US, and the ending of the New Deal’s radical economic and social reform programme in the early 1940s, artists generally became disillusioned and individualistic, seeking to find modes of expression that they thought could transcend the horrors of world war, the failure of radical political beliefs, and the growing alienation they felt in 1950s American consumer^- capitalist society. As the two elements of the term suggest, paintings by these artists brought together abstract (and non-narrative) pictorial^ conventions with expressive, non-illusionistic devices for conveying feeling, though there was a wide variety of both, and the
extent of contrast can be seen by comparing, for instance, a Pollock ‘drip-painting’, such as Number One 1948 (1948), with the ‘colourfield’ effect of Rothko’s Light Red over Black (1957). Works by other abstract expressionists, such as Adolph Gottlieb and Clyfford Still clearly fall between the ‘drip’ and the ‘field’ categories, combining elements of both in various ways. Since the 1970s art critics and historians have reappraised the
movement in a number of ways: for instance, looking at the manipulation of abstract expressionism ‘as a weapon of the cold war’ during the 1950s and 1960s – the main interest of social historians of art. In a different direction, more recent scholarship has examined how the ‘Americanness’ of this art actually concerned much more than simply the US government’s post-1945 cold war political-ideological agenda. Questions of gender, feminism, and the relationship between expressiveness, action, aesthetics, and sexuality have been raised, though the phase ‘women abstract expressionist’ still seems an unlikely combination (like ‘women surrealist’), despite the fact that, for instance, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler have long been identified as – marginal – members of the overall grouping. Recent research has stressed the importance of AfricanAmerican abstract expressionists, such as Norman Lewis, and investigated the reasons why, despite accusations of its Cold War imperialist character, some Latin American critics and artists positively embraced abstract expressionism as a model of artistic freedom.
