Above: Fashion by Dolce and Gabbana inspired by Pop-art and Abstract Expressionism
"Representation of internal feelings" - an American Post-War Art Movement in the late 1940s and 60s.
In 1930 there were ground-breaking exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York which promoted European avant-garde art and so helped to pave the way for Abstract Expressionism. The art scene was not what it once used to be in Europe due to facism and the outbreak of World War II. This was a reason why many European artists moved to America, such as Hans Hoffman, Salvador Dali,Andre Breton and Piet Mondrian.
After the war, in Europe, the most distinctive approach to painting was called art informel ("formless" art) or Lyrical Abstraction or tachisme (tache, "spot" or "stain"). In New York, American artists, deeply affected by the ideas of Surrealism and the teaching of Hans Hoffman, began working in a style collectively called Abstract Expressionism.
There were differences in the technical and aesthetic values of Abstract Expressionism which led the movement to be split in two different sideways. Jackson Pollock is probably the first artist from this movement that comes to mind for most of us. Pollock started the energetic action painting, characterized by active paint handling. Whereas artists like Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko did Colour Field painting, distinguished by broad sweeping fields of colour.
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)
Alcoholic and self-destructive yet he is the most famous of the Jung-inspired Abstract Expressionists. He worked on large canvases spread out on the floor and in 1946-47 he began to employenamel house paints along with conventional oils which he dropped onto his canvases with sticks and brushes using a variety of fluid arm and wrist movements.
The result over the next four years was a series of graceful linear abstractions such as Autumn Rythm (Number 30). Delicate skeins of paint effortlessly loop over and under one another in a mesmerizing pattern without beginning or end that spreads evenly across the surface of the canvas. Pollock has said that he found "pure harmony" when at work on his drip paintings. Willem de Kooning on the other hand said that "Art never seem to make me peaceful or pure".
Willem de Kooning was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States in 1926. After a period of painting in a nonrepresentational mode, he shocked the New York art world in the early 1950s by returning to the figure with a series of paintings of women. The first of the series, Woman I, took him almost two years to paint. His wife, the artist Elaine de Kooning, said that he painted it, scraped it and repainted it at least several dozen times.
Part of de Kooning's dissatisfaction stemmed from the way his figure, inspired by conventionally pretty images of women seen in American advertising, kept veering away from those models. What emerges in Woman I is not the elegant companion of Madison Avenue fantasy but a powerful adversary, more dangerous than alluring. Only the soft pastel colours and luscious paint surface give any hint of de Kooning's original sources, and these qualities are nearly lost in the furious slashing of the paint.
His paintings were carefully orchestrated build-up of interwoven strokes and planes of colour based largely on the example of Analytic Cubism. The deeper roots of de Koonings work on the other hand lie in the colouristic tradition of artist’s such as Titian and Rubens.
