A Short, Honest History of Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism is a movement built on a simple premise: that emotion and idea could be conveyed through color, gesture and scale alone, without any recognizable subject standing in the way. It emerged in New York in the 1940s and remains one of the most influential developments in twentieth-century painting. Understanding where abstract expressionist paintings came from helps explain why the movement still shapes so much contemporary color-driven work today. How the Movement Began Abstract expressionism developed in New York during and after the Second World War, as a generation of American painters, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, moved away from European figurative traditions toward something more immediate and personal. The movement wasn't a single, unified style so much as a shared attitude: painting as an act of direct expression rather than depiction, with the canvas itself becoming a record of the artist's process. It a...