While the term "Abstract Expressionism" was first used to describe Wassily Kandinsky's paintings in 1919, the movement associated with the term began in the 1940s and reached its peak in the 1950s. Critics of the movement pointed towards its name's inherent contradiction. To abstract something involves a removal of representation, in varying degrees, to the point where no objects or figures can be discerned. Expression, like any other form of communication, relies on the very symbols and signs abstraction attempts to remove. Abstract Expression, therefore, implies a process of conveying an emotion, an experience, an idea through the language of color, line, and non-objective forms.
Many scholars attribute the beginning of the American Abstract Expressionist movement to the moment Jackson Pollock splattered paint directly onto a canvas placed on the floor in 1946. There were, however, already artists wrestling with the movement's core philosophical ideals in intellectual meeting places like the Club on 8th Street in New York and in numerous art schools on the West Coast. Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg had varying ideas of what constitutes Abstract Expressionism. Rosenberg aligned the movement's hallmark practice of "action painting" with Surrealist automatism. In another camp, Greenberg described AbEx as nothing more than "painterly abstraction," characterized by artists returning to the Impressionist tradition of loading their brushes or applying paint with a palette knife in a freeform manner.
Second-Generation Abstract Expressionism
Second-generation Abstract Expressionists, like Ernest Briggs and Seymour Boardman, differentiated themselves from their predecessors by turning their attention away from their inner selves, attempting instead to express the phenomena of the natural world. To many of these artists in the late 1950s and 1960s, particularly those in the New York School, focused less on spontaneously conveying their unique experience as an individual and more on how they experienced the world around them.
Abstract Expressionism in Context
According to the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, abstract art in the twentieth century can be divided into three broad periods. The first period, modernism, from 1905 to 1920 came out of European post-Impressionist movements like Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. Between 1920 and 1940, the inter-war period, artists within the competing styles of Surrealism and Dada with Neo-Plasticism, Suprematism, and Constructivism struggled to find appropriate ways to convey the destruction and anxiety that came with World War 1 and the Great Depression in Europe and America, respectively. Abstract-Expressionism fits into the third category, post-war abstraction, along with Pop Art and Minimalism. AbEx marked the shift of the center of the art world from Paris to New York and the movement continues to provide inspiration to contemporary abstract artists around the world.