Art In Society

14 Pages 3470 Words

ract expressionism was, therefore, the first movement to originate in the United States.
During the war, in the times of chaos that existed in the world, America met the challenge of being the leader in art and developing their own movement which would span the 1940’s and the 1950’s. One of the most important artists in abstract expressionism was Jackson Pollack. Pollack’s work runs throughout the span of the movement. The famous method of “action painting” which Pollack developed was much like the times he, and the other artists who practiced this method, lived in. “While there appears to be chaos in the erratic and loose placement of paint and strokes, there is still a great sense of the pieces being defined and controlled” . The abstract expressionists thought of their paintings as living things. In Jackson Pollack’s “My Painting”, from 1947, he says, “The source of my painting is the unconscious” . The world around Pollack and all world citizens at this point was chaotic—communism was running rampant, war had ripped throughout Europe, the nuclear bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Yet, in this seemingly chaotic and uncontrollable world, these artists were seeking to reach away from life and towards the unconscious to control and to define, not destroy and massacre like the Cold War had. The abstract expressionists saw their “representations of paintings as continuous organisms, not merely an object left to hang on the wall, but as a living entity that continues in motion” . Abstract expressionism dominated the art community for almost two decades and remained based in America. In some ways, abstract expressionism “worked to reestablish art to its truest meaning—the existence of art in relation to the artists, and its eventual impact on society” . On the other hand, the movements that began to coalesce on the tail end of abstract expressionism were focused at an opposite goal. Instead of using ...