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Abstract Expressionism
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Abstract Expressionism was the dominant movement in experimental American painting from the 1940s through the early 1960s. This book is a collection of articles, reviews, and essays that chronicle the critical history of the movement from its inception to the present. Drawing on a range of sources, including newspapers, magazines, and exhibition catalogues, the original debates about the validity of action painting are dramatically illustrated. The articles selected for the volume include classic statements from the most influential and prolific critics, including Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Hilton Kramer. The editors have ... included contributions of iconoclasts from the 1950s and 1960s such as Leon Golub and John Canaday to suggest the full range of critical discussion. Six representative artists are the subject of extended sections that include biographical chronologies, reviews, and the artists' own comments: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
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Abstract Expressionism is the best kind of art ever created, if you hate art. The Abstract Expressionist art movement was started by this one violent drunk many moons ago when he accidentally defecated all over his bed sheets one night, then squirted catsup and mustard all over the faeces because he thought he was being funny, and then hung the soiled fabric on a clothesline. In a matter of days, that disgusting bed sheet was displayed in a local art museum and pretentious art fags couldn't stay away. One such prick was art critic Robert Coates, who first coined the phrase Abstract Expressionism to describe that garbage.
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Abstract Expressionism has its roots in other earlier 20th century art movements such as Cubism and Surrealism that promoted abstraction rather than representation. The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung provided the intellectual context in this quest for new subject matter.
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The Abstract Expressionism movement had a great run, and by mid 1960's had began to lose its impact on the American art culture. New movements such as Pop Art and Minimalism began to strongly influence the art community and the artists, in keeping with the times, began to engage in the new movement.
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The designation Abstract Expressionism [more] encompasses a wide variety of postwar American painting through which the U.S. first became the center of the avant-garde. Critic Clement Greenberg, a major proponent of the New York School (another name for American artists working in this manner), preferred the term Painterly abstraction in order to describe the formal qualities of this painting: its lack of figuration and loose brushwork. The related term Action Painting was coined by critic Harold Rosenberg to refer to the gestural act of painting, which he considered the artist’s unconscious outpouring or enactment of some personal drama. The expressive aspect of this art has been linked to the subjective heroism of earlier forms of Expressionism as well as to the Surrealist technique of automatic writing. The influence of Surrealists and other artists who fled Europe for New York in the late 1930s and the 1940s was integral to the development of Abstract Expressionism.
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Alongside de Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko, the painters who are considered central to Abstract Expressionism include Gorky, Gottlieb, Guston, Kline, Motherwell, Newman, and Still. Most of them struggled for recognition early in their careers, but during the 1950s the movement became an enormous critical and financial success. It had passed its peak by 1960, but several of the major figures continued productively after this and a younger generation of painters carried on the Abstract Expressionist torch. Sculptors as well as painters were influenced by the movement, the leading figures including Ibram Lassaw (1913– ), Seymour Lipton (1903–86), and Theodore Roszak (1907–81). By 1960... reaction against the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism was under way, in the shape principally of Pop art and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Indeed, much of the subsequent history of American art can be written in terms of developments from or responses to the movement, and Robert Hughes considers that its success has ‘encouraged a phony grandiloquence, a confusion of pretentious size with scale, that has plagued American painting ever since’.
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