The New York School

After the Second World War the centre of art moved from Paris to New York, where the Abstract Expressionists painted on a large scale, freely and gesturally.

In the 1940s many European artists came to New York fleeing the war, among them Mondrian, Max Ernst and André Breton. Young American painters encountered Surrealist ideas about the unconscious and began to seek a free painting of their own. Out of this grew Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement to have a major international influence.

The movement had two main strands. One was action painting, in which Jackson Pollock dripped and flung paint over canvases laid on the floor and Willem de Kooning painted with violent brushstrokes. The other was colour field painting, in which Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still let large fields of colour fill the entire canvas.

The canvases were often enormous and were meant to envelop the viewer. The artists spoke of the sublime, of myths and of individual freedom. The critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg formulated theories of the new painting. In the 1950s the works were exhibited in Europe, and New York became the world's leading art city.

• Pollock on the floor
• Rothko's colour fields
• The women of the movement