Postwar New York painting dethroned Paris as art’s capital
Abstract expressionism rose in the United States after World War II and went mainstream in the 1950s, breaking with 1930s social realism. Critic Robert Coates applied the label to American art in 1946. It was the first U.S. movement to seize international leadership from Paris.
Centered on the New York School, it included painters plus sculptors and collagists such as David Smith and Louise Nevelson. Surrealist automatism—Masson, Ernst, and others—fed techniques like Pollock’s floor drips; newer research highlights exile Wolfgang Paalen’s theoretical role. Critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg amplified the work.
The name echoes 1919 German usage in Der Sturm and Alfred Barr’s 1929 description of Kandinsky; Coates reused it reviewing Hans Hofmann in 1946. Emotion from German Expressionism met anti-figurative lessons from Futurism, Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. The posture looked rebellious and idiosyncratic, even nihilistic to some. Pollock's floor-based dripping also owed something to David Alfaro Siqueiros. Around 1944 Barnett Newman drew up a list of the new movement's men, naming Paalen twice alongside Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Hofmann, Baziotes and Gorky, with Motherwell followed by a question mark.
Its roster ran from Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Norman Lewis and Lee Krasner. Rosenberg described the canvas as an arena for action, a phrase that defined the action painters. Paul Hultberg pushed the medium further, firing huge vitreous-enamel murals on copper and steel in the open air because no kiln could hold them. Paalen's 1943 essay Totem Art, drawing on quantum ideas and the painting of British Columbia's Indigenous peoples, reached Rothko, Newman and Noguchi. By the early 1960s the movement's dominance had faded, and reactions against its individualism fed Pop art and Minimalism, while Tachisme and Neo-expressionism carried its influence on.
Source: Abstract expressionism
