Essay On Abstract Expressionism

While parts of architecture in the 1950s were reflective of the Cold War conformity, art was an opportunity for people to embrace their individual expression and rebel against the overwhelming pressures to attune to a simplistic lifestyle in response to the government's fear of communism. One of the major movements of this decade was known as Abstract Expressionism. This art style was non-objective and represented no actual objects, rather the artist represents there thoughts through color and form. Abstract Expressionism was also known as Action Painting; the blobs, drips, and whorls that expressed their process of painting was what they saw as the essence of art. These young American artists were redefining art and revolutionizing the aesthetic …show more content…
He created a radical abstract style of painting that fused cubism, surrealism, and expressionism. De Kooning’s pictures typified a vigorous gestural style of movement. “Woman I” depicted a female figure unlike anything seen in Western painting; she was aggressive, erotic, and threatening (see Appendix C). Her unnerving teeth and ferocious eyes were not those of the stereotypically submissive Cold War-era housewife, and she was created in part as a response to the idealized women in art history. Although rarely surviving his work, de Kooning applied magazine images of women’s smiles onto the mouth of his art. This use of popular media is in some way a precursor of pop art, which developed as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. An art critic known as Harold Rosenberg once said, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an area in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Abstract expressionism resisted cohesive style but revealed an expressive content, which eventually opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all art that