Abstract Expressionism for beginners: the canvas as arena

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

After the Second World War, the center of the art world moved from Paris to New York. A group of painters there, many of them refugees or children of immigrants, made huge canvases that were not pictures of anything, but felt like weather, music or prayer. They had read Jung, studied myths and watched the Surrealists in exile. They wanted painting to reach something deep, even sacred, after a war that had shown the worst of humanity.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The myths. Modern How we see it now.

Myths and the unconscious

Historical In the early 1940s, Pollock, Rothko and others painted “mythic” pictures of totems, ancient gods and signs, influenced by Surrealist automatism and by Carl Jung’s ideas about a collective unconscious. Pollock went into Jungian therapy around 1939 and brought drawings to his sessions. The Surrealists in exile in New York, including Max Ernst, showed them how to start from chance.

Pollock and action painting

Historical By 1947 Jackson Pollock (1912 to 1956) laid his canvases on the floor and dripped and poured paint from sticks and cans, moving around them like a dancer. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950), at the Met, is over five meters wide, a web of black, white and brown. In 1952 the critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that the canvas had become “an arena in which to act”. In 1999 the physicist Richard Taylor and colleagues argued in Nature that the drip paintings contain fractal patterns. In 2006 the physicists Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur replied in the same journal that the patterns are fractal over too small a range to count. The question is still disputed.

Krasner, Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Lewis

Historical Lee Krasner (1908 to 1984), married to Pollock, was a powerful painter in her own right, and her reputation grew enormously after his death. Helen Frankenthaler poured thinned paint into raw canvas in Mountains and Sea (1952), opening the way to color field painting. Joan Mitchell painted lakes and sunflowers as storms of brushstrokes. Norman Lewis, a Black painter in the group, made shimmering abstractions and also paintings about the civil rights struggle, and was long left out of the history.

Rothko’s chapel

Historical Mark Rothko (1903 to 1970) painted soft-edged rectangles of color floating on large canvases. He said people who wept before his pictures were having the same religious experience he had while painting them. His final great project, a chapel in Houston with fourteen dark paintings, opened in 1971, a year after his death. It is open to all faiths and none.

Not only New York

Historical Gestural abstraction appeared around the world. In 1954 the painter Jirō Yoshihara founded the Gutai group in Ashiya, Japan. Kazuo Shiraga painted with his feet while hanging from a rope, and Saburō Murakami burst through paper screens. In Paris, painters of Art Informel worked in parallel. New York did not own the idea.

The esoteric angle

Historical This was not a Theosophical movement like early abstraction, but its painters spoke openly of myth, the unconscious, the sublime and the sacred. Barnett Newman titled his works after Genesis, the Kabbalah and the Stations of the Cross.

Later tradition During the Cold War, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly funded by the CIA, supported some exhibitions of American art abroad. How much this shaped the movement’s fame is debated.

Modern The Rothko Chapel is still one of the few places where modern art and silence meet.

Try it yourself

Put a large sheet of paper on the floor. With one color, make marks by moving your whole arm, not just your wrist, for two minutes. Then stand up and look. Does it record your mood?

Before and after

Before this: Surrealism.

After this: Pop Art.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.