Abstract Expressionism

The label abstract expressionism covers a new kind of abstract art made in the 1940s and 1950s by a group of American painters, among them Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Most were based in New York. They hoped to make pictures that were abstract yet carried feeling, and they took encouragement from the Surrealists' notion that the unconscious mind is where art begins. Two main currents are usually told apart. The action painters, led by Pollock and de Kooning, worked by improvisation and often swept big brushes across the canvas; Pollock laid his canvas on the floor and moved around it, pouring and trailing paint onto it. The colour field painters, among them Rothko and Barnett Newman, were drawn to religion and myth and built plain compositions from broad areas of colour, meant to bring the viewer into a calm, reflective state. In the notes for its Turner exhibition, Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art mentions that in the later twentieth century these painters were discussed together with the idea of the “abstract sublime”.

Work out how the paint got onto the surface—poured, dragged, swept on with a big brush, or laid in one large field of colour—then notice how close or how far you want to stand.

• Abstract art 추상미술→Abstract expressionism is one chapter in the wider story of abstract art.
• Expressionism 표현주의→Abstract expressionism grew out of expressionist painting in the postwar United States, moving further toward abstraction.