Abstract Expressionnism

The abstract expressionnism is a artistic Mouvement which developed shortly after the Second world war and which consists in retranscribing its thoughts and its feelings with abstract forms and very varied colors.

The movement was born with New York towards 1946 and perduré mainly with the the United States until 1970. It is divided into 5 phases: the first generation, the gestural abstraction (action painting), the chromatic abstraction (colorfield), post-pictorial abstraction and geometric abstraction. In the action painting the idea is to give importance to texture and the matter like with the gestures of the artist. In the colorfield, it is the unification of the colors and the forms which is most important.

History

The abstract expressionnism appears in 1946, during an exposure to New York, financed by public funds. This art which wanted to be avant-gardist, Cosmopolite and apolitical made move the heart of the modern art of Paris with New York. However, the abstract expressionnism causes debates within the American political community. The Républicains violently attack this current and show it to be communist. With the Congress, they denounce moreover the federal financings which are allotted to the painters expressionnists. The beginning of the Années 1950 sees the reinforcement of this opposition because of the Maccarthisme: the artists suspected of communist sympathies become the object of investigations (“Chasse for the witches”).

However, the period is also marked by the support of the MoMA of New York, itself financed by the Fondation Rockefeller. In 1952, the museum organizes even an international programme of world diffusion of the abstract expressionnism. The exposure The New American Painting does not have other goals.

Analyzes

Harold Rosenberg, in an article of stores Art News published in 1952, wrote: (...) one after the other, the American Peintres started to regard the fabric as an arena in which to act, rather than like a space where to reproduce, redraw, analyze or express an object, reality or imaginary. What was born on the fabric was not more one image but an event.

According to Clement Greenberg The conscience as a Leitmotiv was born from an idea of oneself very major in these artists. Time, the identity and the relation in the world are fundamental data . The principle which supports the formal theory of Greenberg is the autoreferentiality of work. The table does not refer any more but to itself. It is to some extent the specificity of the medium. Always according to Clement Greenberg, the arrival of the camera released the painting of the constraints of realism. The medium could thus take a less definite orientation, more abstracted, which would approach more the music. One sought to reproduce rate/rhythm and harmony.

Painters

Sculptors

David Smith (1906-1965)

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