"It was Elaine de Kooning who perhaps best described the nature of Abstract Expressionism when she wrote: The main difference, then, between abstract and non-abstract art is that the abstract artists does not have to choose a subject. But whether or not he chooses, he always ends up with one."
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
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
View all quotes by Abstract expressionism"Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didnt have any beginning or any end. He didnt mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment. Only he didnt know it."
"..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.."
"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."
"Jackson has broken the ice for us."