Abstract Expressionism

By the early 1940s, several European artists displaced by the Second World War — Ernst, Léger, Mondrian, Breton himself — had gathered in New York, and their contact with American painters who were already pushing toward gestural and automatist work sparked a generation-defining movement. Abstract Expressionism, the first major art movement to emerge from the United States, split into two broad tendencies. Action Painting — as the critic Harold Rosenberg named it in 1952 — treated the canvas as an arena in which the physical act of painting was the subject: Pollock's dripped skeins of enamel, de Kooning's slashing brushwork, Kline's black structural strokes. The Color Field painters — Rothko, Newman, Still — stripped gesture out and worked instead with large areas of hovering, breathing colour: Rothko's luminous rectangles are perhaps the purest example, designed to be encountered at close range where they become almost physically enveloping.

How to recognise it

Scale is often the first fact: many canonical Abstract Expressionist works are very large — Pollock's *One: Number 31* is nearly 270 × 530 cm. The all-over composition (Pollock) distributes activity across the entire surface with no compositional centre or hierarchy. Action Painting shows its physical making: drips, splatters, raw canvas stained through, brush dragged quickly with visible bristle marks, paint built into impasto ridges. Color Field work is calmer and more measured: large soft-edged rectangles or zones of colour, colour that seems to bloom or vibrate, thin stained or washed application that sinks into the canvas rather than sitting on it. The absence of any representational imagery is absolute. If the painting seems to be primarily about the physical energy of its making, it belongs here.