"I think I had been badly affected by.. ..the romance of Abstract Expressionism. ..particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person, particularly [described] in magazines like Art News and Arts, which I read religiously.. .I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasnt so wrapped up in the hullabaloo.. ..something that stable in a sense, something that wasnt constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux. [reaction on a question about gesture panting ]"
Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was
"..with experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I dont use – I dont use the accident – cause I deny the accident.. ..its quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what Im about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, its direct.."
"We followed Romany Marie from Eighth Street, where Gorky once gave a chalk talk on Cubism, to several other locations. Her place came closer to being a Continental café with its varied types of professionals than any other place I knew. It was in Maries where we once formed a group, Graham, Edgar Levy, Resnikoff, de Kooning, Gorky and myself, being asked to join. This was short-lived. We never exhibited and we lasted in union about thirty days. Our only action was to notify the Whitney Museum that we were a group and would only exhibit in the 1935 abstract show if all were asked. Some of us were, some exhibited, some didnt, and that ended our group. But we were all what was then termed abstractionists. [impression of the late 1930s]"
"I dont care for abstract expressionism.. ..and it is certainly not non-objective, and not non-representational either. Im very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when youre painting out of your consciousness, figures are bound to emerge. Were all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. Ive been a Jungian for a long time.. .Painting is a state of being.. .Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."
"If the label Abstract Expressionism means anything, it means painterliness: loose, rapid handling, or the look of it; masses that blotted and fused instead of shapes that stayed distinct; large and conspicuous rhythms; broken color, uneven saturations or densities of paint, exhibited brush, knife, of finger marks – in short, a constellation of qualities like those defined by Heinrich Wölfflin when he extracted his notion of Malerische [= Painterliness ] from Baroque art."
"Surrealism was one of the influential trends with which American artists were coming to terms, in particular, when the coming to-power of the National Socialists in Germany and the outbreak of the second World War forced numerous exponents of the surrealist movement to emigrate to the United States."
"Hans Hofmann (1950), in Artists Session at Studio 35; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 225"