Oversized canvases splattered with paint, dense black marks and calm expanses of colour: Abstract Expressionism was the art movement that translated emotions into paint and made New York the global epicentre of contemporary art.

Emotional art

Pictorial gestures of personal emotions

Hailed as the first art movement to emerge in the United States to have a worldwide impact, Abstract Expressionism is characterised by a non-figurative use of painting as a means of personal expression. It emerged in the United States in the 1940s, with Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothk and Willem de Kooning as its leading exponents.
Abstract Expressionism encompassed many stylistic trends, although it fell into two particularly prominent subcategories: action painting (or "gestural painting"), exemplified by de Kooning and Pollock, and colour-field painting (or "colour-field painting"), whose most prominent representative was Rothko. Throughout, the Abstract Expressionists strove to convey ideas and ideas through marks, shapes, textures, tonalities and the particular quality of the brushstrokes. The movement favoured large-scale canvases and embraced accident and chance.
With illustrated works by 20 key Abstract Expressionist artists, this book presents the movement that shifted the centre of gravity of art from Paris to New York and remains for many the golden age of American art.

About the author

Barbara Hess (b. 1964), art historian, critic and translator, lives in Cologne. Since 1994 she has written numerous texts on contemporary art for publications such as Camera Austria, Flash Art, Kunst-BulletinyTexte zur Kunst. Together with Ulrike Groos and Ursula Wevers, she curated the touring exhibition "Ready to Shoot. Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum/videogalerie schum" (2003/2004, hosted among other places at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris).

Publisher: Taschen