Essay On American Abstract Expressionism

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American Abstract Expressionism was a post-WW2 art movement that developed in New York in the 1940's. This movement put New York City on the map as the center of the Western art world and was also the first American art movement to gain international influence.
The movements formation can be directly attributed to devastating conditions back to back World Wars had caused in Europe. Paris, formerly the center of the western art world was in complete ruins. No longer were American artist able to look to the European art world for inspiration because social and technological progress in Europe had seemingly come to a halt.
In an attempt to break away from what had become the norm for painting during the Depression years a small group of New …show more content…
Their essays highlighted the important principles and artist within New York Vangaurd. However, they would often not see eye to eye with one another.
Greenberg was a fan of Jackson Pollock. He wrote that Pollocks work was the next stage in the Modernist art movement, "though he cannot build with color, Pollock has an instinct for bold oppositions of dark and light, and the capacity to bind the canvas rectangle and assert its ambiguous flatness and quite unambiguous shape as a single and whole image concentrating into one the several images distributed over it." (Greenberg, American Type Painting) This description of Pollocks work I believe is seen in his piece, Blue Poles.
In contrast, Rosenberg saw the canvas as an "arena in which to act"…"What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."(Rosenberg, American Action Painters) This lead him to prefer the works of action painters, a term he coined, such as, William de Kooning. De Kooning's intense brush strokes capture Rosenberg's ideal action painter. While Rosenberg did not mention de Kooning by name in his essay American Action Painters, it is clear his opinions would draw him to the type of abstract expressionism seen in Kooning's work Police
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