Abstract Expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the immediate aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the epicenter of this movement, included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning and Theodoros Stamos among others.
Clement Greenberg, occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) is a Canadian arts-related organization that was founded in 1880.
Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.
Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting:
Jack Hamilton Bush was a Canadian abstract painter. A member of Painters Eleven, his paintings are associated with the Color Field movement and Post-painterly Abstraction. Inspired by Henri Matisse and American abstract expressionist painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Bush encapsulated joyful yet emotional feelings in his vibrant paintings, comparing them to jazz music. Clement Greenberg described him as a "supreme colorist", along with Kenneth Noland in 1984. Bush explained that capturing the feeling of a subject rather than its likeness was
a hard step for the art loving public to take, not to have the red look like a side of a barn but to let it be the red for its own sake and how it exists in the environment of that canvas.
Timothy Melvin Zuck was a Canadian painter of representational images with an orientation towards abstraction and a tranquil atmosphere distilled from the world around him. He was also an educator.
Karl Stanley Benjamin was an American painter of vibrant geometric abstractions, who rose to fame in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles–based Abstract Classicists and subsequently produced a critically acclaimed body of work that explores a vast array of color relationships. Working quietly at his home in Claremont, CA, he developed a rich vocabulary of colors and hard-edge shapes in masterful compositions of tightly balanced repose or high-spirited energy. At once intuitive and systematic, the artist was, in the words of critic Christopher Knight, "a colorist of great wit and inventiveness."
Alex Simeon Janvier, LL.D is a First Nation artist in Canada. As a member of the commonly referred to "Indian Group of Seven", Janvier is a pioneer of contemporary Canadian Aboriginal art in Canada.
Arthur Fortescue McKay, best known as Art McKay was a Canadian painter and a member of The Regina Five. Many of his works are modernist abstractions.
Carol Lorraine Sutton is a multidisciplinary artist born in Norfolk, Virginia, USA and now living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is a painter whose works on canvas and paper have been shown in 32 solo exhibits as well as being included in 94 group shows. Her work, which ranges from complete abstraction to the use of organic and architectural images, relates to the formalist ideas of Clement Greenberg and is noted for the use of color. Some of Sutton paintings have been related to ontology.
Marion Florence Nicoll was a Canadian painter. She is known as one of the first abstract painters in Alberta. In 1933 she became the first woman instructor at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art. In 1977 Nicoll became the first woman artist in the Prairies to become a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Monica Tap is a Canadian painter, artist and educator. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, and teaches at the University of Guelph. She is known for engaging and challenging conventions concerning landscape and still-life painting.
Helen Stadelbauer was a Canadian painter and educator known for her establishment of the Art Department at the University of Calgary.
Kikuo Saito was a Japanese-born American abstract painter with ties to the Color Field movement and Lyrical abstraction. A former assistant to Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons, Saito's work infuses richly saturated colorscapes with delicately drawn lines. Saito was the creator of sui generis theatre and dance events, collaborating with innovative directors and choreographers Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Jerome Robbins, and dancer and choreographer Eva Maier, to whom he was married for several decades. His productions combined wordless drama in the poetic frameworks of light, costumes, music, and dance, most of which he devised and directed himself.
Dennis Burton was a Canadian modernist painter.
David T. Alexander is a Canadian painter, known for breathing new life into the landscape tradition of Canada as well as for working in a serious and ambitious manner to reinvigorate the contemporary practice of landscape painting.
Ann Clarke is a Canadian artist, who creates vibrant gestural abstract paintings and drawings which reveal her formal interests as well as a fascination with twenty-first century technologies. She is also an educator.
Leopold Plotek, combines abstraction and figuration in large format paintings which take as their starting point his memories, his experience of architecture, objects and art, as well as his readings in art, history, and poetry of all periods. His references are elliptically treated however, as he develops ways of painting them according to his own recipe which varies, picture to picture. In this singular pictorial dynamic, each painting is basically a conception on its own, though a series of sorts can exist. As a result, certain of Plotek’s paintings prefigure the practice of many contemporary abstract painters and can be viewed, like them, as extending the range of abstraction.
