The post-war era

The center of the art world moved to New York, and painting became an act.

After the Second World War, New York became the center of the art world. The Abstract Expressionists – Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko – painted huge canvases in which the gesture or the field of color was everything.

In Europe, Concrete artists, the painters of Art Informel and the Cobra group worked with abstraction and spontaneity. Giacometti and Bacon gave form to existential anguish after the horrors of the war.

Around 1960 Pop Art turned its gaze to advertising, comics and celebrities – Warhol, Lichtenstein, Hockney. Minimalism stripped away everything personal, and happenings and Fluxus turned art into an event. Sweden, too, gained a place on the international map with the Moderna Museet in 1958.