A painter on the floor
Long Island, summer 1950. In a converted barn, Jackson Pollock laid a huge, unprimed canvas on the floor. He walked around it, leaned over it and let enamel paint drip, fling and run from sticks and hardened brushes. The photographer Hans Namuth captured this in photographs and a film. The images sealed Pollock’s fame, making him the epitome of an artist whose movement itself becomes the picture.
Pollock had been painting this way since 1947. In 1949 Life magazine asked whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States. His painting Number 32, 1950 was bought by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in 1964 and now hangs in K20 in Düsseldorf.
New York instead of Paris
Until the Second World War, Paris was considered the capital of art. Then many European artists fled the war and the Nazis to New York, among them Max Ernst, André Breton, André Masson and Piet Mondrian. Young American painters learned from them, above all the Surrealist principle of automatism: painting without the intellect guiding the hand.
From 1942 the collector Peggy Guggenheim showed the European avant-garde alongside young Americans in her gallery Art of This Century, and in 1943 she signed Pollock to a contract. The critic Robert Coates used the term “Abstract Expressionism” in The New Yorker in 1946.
Action Painting
Two tendencies can be distinguished within the movement. In 1952 the critic Harold Rosenberg spoke of “Action Painting”: the canvas was an arena in which the painter acts, and the picture the trace of that action. Besides Pollock, this included Franz Kline with his black beams on white grounds and Willem de Kooning, who in his Woman series both depicted and dismantled the female figure with savage brushstrokes.
Fields of colour
The second tendency worked with large, calm areas of colour. From around 1950, Mark Rothko painted stacked, floating rectangles with soft edges that seem to glow or breathe depending on the light. He wanted viewers to stand close to the pictures and be enveloped by them. He withdrew his Seagram Murals, intended for a New York restaurant, and gave some of them to the Tate in London. They arrived there in 1970 on the day Rothko was found dead. In 1971 the Rothko Chapel opened in Houston, a space devoted entirely to his dark paintings.
Barnett Newman divided vast fields of colour with narrow vertical stripes that he called “zips”. His Vir Heroicus Sublimis, more than five metres wide, was meant to evoke the feeling of the sublime that the Romantics had already sought.
The women painters
For a long time Abstract Expressionism was told as the art of lonely male geniuses. In fact women painters shaped the movement from the start. Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, developed an independent body of work that long stood in his shadow. Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan exhibited in the legendary Ninth Street Show of 1951. For Mountains and Sea in 1952, Helen Frankenthaler poured thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas, founding the “soak-stain” technique that shaped Color Field painting in the 1960s.
Art in the Cold War
In the 1950s Abstract Expressionism became an export. The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition The New American Painting toured eight European countries in 1958 and 1959, including Germany. In 1959 documenta II in Kassel showed Pollock and his colleagues. It later emerged that the CIA had funded cultural programmes through front organisations, which also promoted this art as an expression of Western freedom. How great this influence actually was remains disputed among scholars.
Why it still matters
Abstract Expressionism made New York the centre of the art world and pushed painting to its limits in scale, freedom and reduction. Pop Art and Minimal Art arose in reaction to it. And paintings by Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning are today among the most expensive works of art ever sold.
Further reading
- Irving Sandler: The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970).
- Serge Guilbaut: How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983).