Action Painting

Action Painting

Changing concerns in the field of theory and practice reflected developments in the social and economic structures after the horrible events of World War II. The complex relationship between the loss of faith in the Enlightenment’s promise that rationality would produce increased freedom and changes in cultural value systems caused by revolutionary developments in science and technology brought into focus natural contradictions in modern thinking.

Abstract Expressionists of the 1940’s and 50’s were abstract artists because they had been schooled in early modern painting. They were expressionist artists because of their strong belief in the individual gesture and in the freedom to practice by any means, including the human figure (literally), to convey their intentions. Abstract Expressionism was the first art movement with both American and European roots. They reflected the strength of émigré artists such as Max Ernst, Matta, Arshile Gorky, and Piet Mondrian who had fled the war and destruction of Europe.

Abstract Expressionists used numerous sources from the history of modern painting to combine the old with the new, for example: the expressionism of Van Gogh, the abstraction of Kandinsky, the saturated colors of Matisse, and the fascination with the unconscious of surrealist painters like Dali. Abstract Expressionism was less a style than an attitude. Another thing that was important to painters was to tap into the psychic self, also a steady faith in the expressive character of the “mark”.

Without realism’s impression to the visible world, abstraction would be able to portray like the “subject” of something as real as a feeling or simply- art itself. As Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb onc...

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...achieved in its own medium and effects exclusive to itself. During the 1960’s many artists and critics who saw his view too “self-referential” and resistant to change questioned Greenberg. A lot of contemporary criticism had been dedicated to refuting his theories. But recently, his theories have been reconsidered once again in the light of politics.

Bibliography:

Works Cited

Bocola, Sandro. The Art of Modernism. New York, NY: Prestel Verlag®, 1999.

Marilyn, Stokstad. Art Histor: Revised Edition. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and Prentice Hall,

Inc., Publishers 1999.

“The Greenberg Symposia,” ArtNetWeb.

http://www.awa.com/artnet/printed/artnetweb.views/special/wh99/ch4/wh20_1.htm

(14 Feb. 2002)

“Jackson Pollock,” NationalGallery of Art, Washington D.C.

http://www.nga.gov.uhs.bsd.edu/uhs/topics/feature/pollock.html (14 Feb.2002)