Development of Abstract Expressionism

Since the late nineteenth century a great variety of art styles appeared. A great industrial growth, the fast and impressing progress in science and technology made the society believe in the coming of a brand new era with new laws and realities. This new era demanded new art, so many innovative ideas appeared often having little in common with famous classical etalons.

One of such tendencies was so called Abstract Expressionism which appeared in USA, mainly in New York, during the late 1940s. That was actually well corresponding with the state of affairs in the world. After the World War II America reached a dominating position on the globe and began to influence cultural trend worldwide. This backward helped a group of New York painters to become famous by producing bold, multicolored canvases where lines and spots were whirling around in a wild and free manner, and sometimes vague figures could be seen or imagined. ‘It moves towards creation out of no given or the minimum possible given. The artist creates not only his own paintings but also his own world and the laws by which it operates, its own intrinsic aim and even himself, out of the act of painting. He simultaneously creates and destroys paintings, the possibility of painting, and himself.’ (Fanchon Fröhlich 5). The main representatives of the Abstract Expressionism style were Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning. That painting school was obviously influenced by Expressionism and Cubism, being some kind of an integration of them.

By the beginning of 1960s the American society as well as the European one had changed much. The extravagant, oversaturated and ambiguous abstract style went out of fashion as the art became more masses-oriented. So a new wave known as Pop-Art entered the scene. According to the expert’s, ‘Pop Art is in a way a return to the object as an avant garde movement after abstract painting by literally presenting the ordinary object itself, not a painted representation of it, or else by making large images for serious or satiric contemplation from the banal images of advertising and newspapers to which one normally gives only fleeting attention.’ (Fanchon Fröhlich 2). New York painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are considered as creators of that technology-minimizing and color palette simplifying style; their followers Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and Roy Lichtenstein are well-known too.

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