Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism was the first American art movement to lead the world: a generation of New York painters who, in the 1940s and 1950s, made large abstract pictures driven by gesture or by fields of colour, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko foremost among them.
The New Yorker's critic Robert Coates applied the phrase to American painting in 1946; the painters themselves preferred 'the New York School'. Most had come through the Depression and the government's art projects, and through Surrealism, which arrived in person when Ernst, Masson, Matta and Breton came to New York as refugees in the early 1940s. From Surrealism they took automatism; from the war, a sense that the old subjects were exhausted. By 1947 Pollock was laying his canvases on the studio floor and pouring and dripping paint onto them from above.
Critics split the movement in two. Harold Rosenberg called the gestural side action painting in 1952, the canvas as an arena in which to act: Pollock, de Kooning, Franz Kline and Lee Krasner. The other side, Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, worked with large, still fields of colour meant to absorb the viewer, and came to be called colour field painting. Through the 1950s a second generation, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Sam Francis among them, extended both. MoMA's touring exhibition The New American Painting, shown in eight European countries in 1958 and 1959 and ending at the Tate in London, made the movement's name abroad.
At a glance
- When
- 1940s to 1950s
- Where
- New York
- Leading artists
- Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner
Characteristics of Abstract Expressionism
- Scale
- Canvases big enough to surround the viewer.
- Gesture
- The painter's movement recorded in drips, pours and sweeping brushstrokes.
- All-over composition
- No single focus: the whole surface equally active, edge to edge.
- Fields of colour
- Large areas of flat or softly stained colour, made for contemplation.
- Spontaneity
- Improvisation and the unconscious, inherited from Surrealist automatism.
- An attitude, not a style
- Pollock's webs, Rothko's rectangles and de Kooning's women all belong.
Abstract Expressionist artists
Every artist below has a page on this site, with a short biography and what a valuation of their work turns on.
Action painting
- Jackson PollockPut the canvas on the floor and poured, and made American painting the centre of the argument.
- Willem de KooningStowed away to America at twenty-two, and painted Woman until people shouted at him.
- Franz KlineBlack bars across white canvas, painted with a decorator's brush and a great deal of thought.
- Lee KrasnerAbstract Expressionist who cut up her own canvases to make better ones, and outlived the myth around her husband.
- Hans HofmannTaught half of New York how to paint, then out-painted most of them after he turned seventy.
- Arshile GorkyArmenian-American painter whose fluid, biomorphic abstractions opened the way to Abstract Expressionism.
- Philip GustonAbandoned admired abstraction in 1970 for hoods, shoes and cigarettes, and was pilloried for it.
- Jack TworkovAbstract Expressionist who walked away from gesture and spent his last twenty years on the grid.
Colour field
- Mark RothkoRectangles of colour that hover, painted by a man who insisted they were about tragedy, not decoration.
- Barnett NewmanA single vertical band down a field of colour, and forty years of argument about whether that is enough.
- Clyfford StillAbstract Expressionist who walked away from the galleries and left his work to a city that would build a museum for it.
- Robert MotherwellThe scholar of Abstract Expressionism, who painted a hundred elegies to a war he never fought in.
- Adolph GottliebPictographs in a grid, then a disc above a burst, for thirty years.
The second generation
- Joan MitchellPainted remembered landscape in violent colour, from a house above the Seine at Vetheuil.
- Helen FrankenthalerPoured thinned paint into raw canvas in 1952 and changed what the next generation did with a brush.
- Sam FrancisLearned to paint flat on his back in a military hospital, and spent fifty years pushing colour to the edges.
- Paul JenkinsPoured and tilted paint across the canvas with an ivory knife, and let gravity do the drawing.
- Alfonso OssorioFilipino-American heir who bankrolled Pollock, collected Art Brut, and encrusted his own work with everything.
- Mark TobeyInvented white writing after studying calligraphy in a Zen monastery, and spent his last years in Basel.
- Cy TwomblyScribbled, smeared and wrote across huge canvases, and moved to Italy to do it.
Famous Abstract Expressionist works
- Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)Jackson Pollock, 1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- ChiefFranz Kline, 1950, Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Woman IWillem de Kooning, 1950–52, Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Vir Heroicus SublimisBarnett Newman, 1950–51, Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Mountains and SeaHelen Frankenthaler, 1952
- The Seagram muralsMark Rothko, 1958–59, Tate, London
What a valuation turns on
Almost nothing by Pollock, Rothko or de Kooning reaches the market without a long, documented history attached. What comes up more often is work on paper, smaller canvases, prints, and work by the wider circle: the second generation, and painters such as Jack Tworkov, Alfonso Ossorio and Paul Jenkins, whose markets are more accessible and just as dependent on paperwork.
Authentication is the hard part. Several artists' foundations stopped giving opinions after costly lawsuits, and the closure in 2011 of a New York gallery that had sold forged Rothkos, Pollocks and Motherwells for more than a decade made buyers cautious of anything without a documented history. The catalogues raisonnés (Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell among them) are the first check, and a work that is not in one needs exceptional provenance.
Common questions
What is Abstract Expressionism?
Abstract Expressionism is a movement of American painting centred in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, in which artists made large abstract works through spontaneous gesture, as in Pollock's drip paintings, or through broad fields of colour, as in Rothko's. It was the first American movement to influence art worldwide.
Who were the Abstract Expressionists?
Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb and Philip Guston, followed by Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Sam Francis.
What is action painting?
The gestural side of Abstract Expressionism, named by the critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952: painting as a record of the artist's physical act, as in Pollock's pouring and dripping or de Kooning's slashing brushwork.
What is the difference between Abstract Expressionism and colour field painting?
Colour field painting began as one wing of Abstract Expressionism, in Rothko, Newman and Still, and then became a movement of its own. Where action painting is about gesture, colour field is about broad, calm areas of colour with little sign of the hand.
How do I sell an Abstract Expressionist work?
Send photographs of the front, the back, the signature and any labels, with whatever paperwork exists, for a free, confidential valuation. We check the catalogue raisonné and the provenance first, and then compare a confidential private sale with auction.
