Evolution Of Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism signaled a new age of American artistic expression in the immediate postwar period (the late 1940s and 1950s). Though it was never a formal movement, “AbEx” was comprised of artists who had interest in spontaneity, and improvisation. A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art and shifted the art world’s focus. The artists known as Abstract Expressionists, or “The New York School”, shared some common assumptions. Artists such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, David Smith, and Adolph Gottlieb broke away from accepted conventions in technique and subject matter, and made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches. As with Pollock and the others, scale contributed to the meaning. For the time, the works were vast in scale, and they were meant to be seen in close environments, so the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work. The notion is toward the personal rather than the grandiose. The first generation of Abstract Expressionism flourished between 1943 and the mid-’50s. The movement effectively shifted the art world’s focus from Europe (specifically

In the 1940s, Gottlieb began to emulate the art of early Native American and Middle Eastern cultures. In Man Looking at Woman, he uses a palette of earthy colors and compartmentalizes hieroglyphic-like forms into rectangular areas. The artist called works like this Pictographs, a series he started in 1941. Unlike ancient writing systems, these symbols could not be read, but they served as a personal vocabulary from which Gottlieb developed his work, similar to Krasner and her work,