What is Abstract Expressionism? Pollock, Rothko and the New York School

Abstract Expressionism is the movement that emerged in New York during and after the Second World War, with painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler. The paintings are large and abstract and are meant to be experienced directly, either as traces of an action or as pure fields of colour. The movement is also called the New York School and made the city the new centre of art.

Facts

New York during and after the war

During the Depression of the 1930s many young American painters found work in the government’s art projects for unemployed artists, among them Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. They met, talked and saw European Modernism in New York’s museums. When war broke out, several of Europe’s great artists fled to the city, among them Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian and the Surrealists’ leader André Breton.

The Surrealists’ automatic drawing, in which the hand moves without conscious control, was an important impulse. The collector Peggy Guggenheim opened a gallery in New York in 1942 and gave Pollock a contract. After the war the young Americans had found a language of their own: large, abstract and charged with feeling. That is why it is often said that New York took over the role of capital of the art world from Paris. More about the context can be found in the app’s period The New York School and in the Western period the postwar era.

Action painting: Pollock and de Kooning

Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, moved in 1945 to Springs on Long Island, where he worked in a barn. There in 1947 he developed his drip and pour technique. He laid a large, unprimed canvas on the floor and let liquid enamel paint run and splatter from sticks, brushes and cans as he moved around and across the picture. He said that he felt himself to be “in” the painting. Autumn Rhythm of 1950, more than five metres wide, is a dense web of lines in black, white and browns with no centre.

De Kooning worked with a brush, but just as violently. His Woman series, shown in 1953, lets female figures with staring eyes emerge from sweeping brushstrokes, and it upset many, both because he returned to the figure and because of how the woman was portrayed. In 1952 the critic Harold Rosenberg called this way of painting action painting: the canvas became an arena in which the artist acted, and the picture was the trace of the action.

The colour fields: Rothko, Newman and Frankenthaler

The other branch is calmer but no less intense. Around 1950 Rothko had found the form he would keep thereafter: two or three large rectangles with soft, blurred edges floating above one another. In No. 61 (Rust and Blue) of 1953 a rusty brown and a blue meet. He painted in many thin layers, so that the colour seems to glow from within, and he wanted viewers to stand close, so that the picture filled their field of vision. He spoke of tragedy and ecstasy, not of form.

In 1948 Barnett Newman wrote the essay The Sublime Is Now and painted large single-colour fields divided by narrow vertical bands. Helen Frankenthaler took Pollock’s canvases on the floor a step further. In Mountains and Sea of 1952 she poured heavily thinned oil paint onto unprimed canvas, so that the paint soaked into the weave and formed pale, almost watercolour-like fields. The method became a foundation for what is called colour field painting.

Action or surface?

The critics disagreed about what the paintings meant. For Rosenberg they were existential acts. For Clement Greenberg, Pollock was instead the culmination of a long development in which painting purified itself of everything that does not belong to it, until only the flat surface and the paint remained. Greenberg’s ideas became the dominant art criticism of the 1950s. Both views are explained in the aesthetics chapter on the postwar period.

The artists themselves often agreed with neither of them. Rothko refused to be called an abstract formalist and maintained that his pictures were about basic human emotions. Many of them disliked the name Abstract Expressionism. That says something about the movement: it had no common programme, only a common time, place and ambition.

The women, the followers and the reaction

The movement was long described as a male affair, but women were at the heart of it. Lee Krasner was a prominent painter long before she met Pollock, Elaine de Kooning was both a painter and a critic, and Frankenthaler changed painting after Pollock. In recent years their work has been given considerably more space in museums.

Pollock died in a car accident in 1956, and around 1960 new directions took over. The Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, set the personal brushstroke against printed images from advertising and comics, and Lichtenstein even painted brushstrokes that looked like comic-strip drawings. The Minimalists cleared out feeling altogether. Read more in the guides to Pop Art and abstract art.

What to look for

Stand first close up and then far away. In a Pollock drip painting you can follow a single colour, such as the white, through the whole web and see how it lies over or under the others. That shows the order in which he worked. In Rothko you can let your gaze rest on the edges between the fields, where the colour thins out and seems to breathe. Think about size too. A reproduction in a book or on a screen shrinks the pictures to a fraction, and it is precisely the size that makes them envelop the viewer. Compare them with European abstraction such as Kandinsky’s Composition VII of 1913, and read the guide Art to see in New York if you want to see the works in person.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What did the critic Harold Rosenberg call Pollock’s way of painting?