Arrrt Method B 02

Where was this style?

Action Painting is the First American visual arts movement that gained international acclaim

The TERM most accurately describing the Abstract Expressionist paintings is

New York School

▶ Abstract Expressionists insisted their subjects were not “abstract”, but rather primal images deeply rooted in society’s collective unconscious. Their paintings did not express mere emotion.

Mark Rothko, No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black), 1958, oil on canvas, 8′ 10 5/8″ x 9′ 9 1/4″ (The Museum of Modern Art) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

If not just emotions, what else?

▶ They communicated universal truths about the human condition. For these reasons, another term—the New York School—offers a more accurate descriptor of the group, for although some eventually relocated, their distinctive aesthetic first found form in NewYork City.

▶ The growth of Fascism in Europe had brought a wave of immigrant artists to the United States in the 1930s, which gave Americans greater access to ideas and practices of European Modernism.

▶ They sought training at the school founded by German painter Hans Hoffmann, and from Josef Albers, who left the Bauhaus in 1933 to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and later at Yale University.

A brief retrospective of European modernism is helpful in order to better understand the reasons for the emergence of the New York School and to grasp the significance of the movement.

In this section we learned about the New York School and its roots. In the next section we will examining its notable works and gaining insight into their distinctive characteristics.
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