Importance Of Abstract Expressionism

Experienced in European Modernism and having grown weary of the American Realism popular at the time, Abstract Expressionists sought a new form of expression that would allow the flow of their own emotion onto the canvas. They achieved this by rejecting the traditions of illusionistic painting in favor of their own individual mark. Abstract Expressionists chose to express their emotions through action, directly onto their canvases, or by explorations with color, leaving no recognizable images or figuration. Many Abstract Expressionists threw fine art methods out the window by using non-traditional painting techniques. In the painting Number 31 by Jackson Pollock, for example, put his large canvases on the floor and worked in and around them

Rather, the viewer’s eye jumped from zip to zip rendering full immediate comprehension of the entire painting impossible, forcing the viewer to recognize their own presence in the here and now. Many Abstract Expressionists were known for removing figuration and subject matter from their work. Instead, they chose to capture their spontaneous emotive gesture on the canvas, or fill the canvas with flat applications of paint for emotive color effects. In some Abstract Expressionist work, influences of the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing can be seen as action painters allowed freedom to guide their paintbrush over the canvas. The line, which traditionally had been to demarcate the subject, was now used to create the entire visual field of incident. You might think your three-year-old could make a Pollock drip painting, but Abstract Expressionism was truly a watershed moment in the history of art. Until the end of WWII, Paris was considered the art center of the world; American artists were barely taken seriously. Though European modernism had dominated art until this time, New York artists began creating art in a new way: by abandoning geometric abstraction and embracing their own, personal, authentic