An American genre of modern art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstract forms
a New York school of painting characterized by freely created abstractions; the first important school of American painting to develop independently of European styles
A school of painting that flourished after World War II until the early 1960s, characterized by the view that art is nonrepresentational and chiefly improvisational. a style of painting that developed in New York in the late 1940s. It shows shapes and patterns which do not look like real things or people, but are intended to express emotions. It was practised by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Movement in U.S. painting that began in the late 1940s. Its development was influenced by the radical work of Arshile Gorky and Hans Hofmann and by the immigration in the late 1930s and early '40s of many European avant-garde artists to New York. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally regarded as having begun with the paintings done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 1940s and early '50s. Other artists who came to be associated with the style include Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, and Ad Reinhardt. The movement comprised many styles but shared several characteristics. The works were usually abstract (i.e., they depicted forms not found in the natural world); they emphasized freedom of emotional expression, technique, and execution; they displayed a single unified, undifferentiated field, network, or other image in unstructured space; and the canvases were large, to enhance the visual effect and project monumentality and power. The movement had a great impact on U.S. and European art in the 1950s; it marked the shift of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York. See also abstract art; action painting