Abstract Expressionism - a Movement

Abstract Expressionism was a movement that originated in post World War II America, it was the first American art movement that became globally influential and it replaced Paris with New York as the centre of the art world. Abstract Expressionism does not describe one particular style but rather an attitude rooted in a need to express individuality and improvise spontaneously. The movement's name is derived from the influences of the emotional intensities and self denial of the German Expressionists and the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Many modernist artists had fled Paris during World War II, many of whom settled in New York. The modernist movement in New York was influenced by Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Surrealism and Cubism. Jackson Pollack, one of the leading lights in the movement in New York was to re-define the way that art was created. Pollack placed large canvases on the floor, so it could be approached from all sides - smashing prior restrictions on the artistic process - he took the easel and stuck it up art's ass. Abstract Expressionism was on it's way, Pollack had made it alright and damn well encouraged everybody to think out of the box and explore new ways to approach and make art. It must be stressed that the movement was not constituted of artists of the same style, far from it, in fact some of the artists in the movement did not produce works that were either abstract or expressionist. Indeed, some art critics labelled the movement Action Painting or New York School. Broadly speaking, there were two distinct groups in the movement - those who worked with simple, unified blocks of colour, like Rothko, Newman and Still and those who made use of Surrealist techniques of automatic art, like Pollack, De Kooning and Hofmann. All were influenced by Existentialist thinking, which emphasised the importance of the act of creating and not the finished object.