Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects.
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 center of this movement, included such artists as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Theodoros Stamos and Lee Krasner among others.
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American painter and visual artist active primarily in New York whose work has been associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, transitioning to war propaganda artworks during the War Services era.
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
James David Brooks was an American Abstract Expressionist, muralist, abstract painter, art teacher, and winner of the Logan Medal of the Arts.
Betty Parsons was an American artist, art dealer, and collector known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism. She is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic figures of the American avant-garde.
The Art of This Century gallery was opened by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City on October 20, 1942. The gallery occupied two commercial spaces on the seventh floor of a building that was part of the midtown arts district including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Helena Rubinstein's New Art Center, and numerous commercial galleries. The gallery exhibited important modern art until it closed in 1947, when Guggenheim returned to Europe. The gallery was designed by architect, artist, and visionary Frederick Kiesler.
The Parrish Art Museum is an art museum designed by Herzog & de Meuron Architects and located in Water Mill, New York, whereto it moved in 2012 from Southampton Village. The museum focuses extensively on work by artists from the artist colony of the South Shore and North Shore.
Grace Hartigan was an American abstract expressionist painter and a significant member of the vibrant New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle of friends, who frequently inspired one another in their artistic endeavors, included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Frank O'Hara. Her paintings are held by numerous major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As director of the Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting, she influenced numerous young artists.
Lois Erdmann Wright was an American artist, author, and television personality. She was best known for her appearance in the 1975 independent documentary film Grey Gardens by Albert and David Maysles. She was the author of the memoir My Life at Grey Gardens: 13 Months and Beyond. She hosted The Lois Wright Show for LTV Public Access in East Hampton for over 30 years; broadcasting her final show on December 19, 2018. As an artist, she exhibited at Guild Hall in East Hampton and at the National Arts Club in New York. Her art focused mainly on Edith Bouvier Beale and Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale of Grey Gardens.
Nina Yankowitz is an American visual artist known for her work in new media technology, site specific public works, and installation art. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award recipient.
Guild Hall of East Hampton in the incorporated Village of East Hampton on Long Island's East End, is one of the United States' first multidisciplinary cultural institutions. Opened in 1931, it was designed by architect Aymar Embury II and includes a visual art museum with three galleries and the John Drew Theater, a 360 seat proscenium stage. It is historically significant for its role in exhibiting the works of the American Abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, John Ferren, and Robert Motherwell; performances by Helen Hayes, Thornton Wilder, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, and hundreds of other world-class stars of stage and screen; and involvement by the literary figures George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, and John Steinbeck. It holds a permanent collection of 2,400 works of art and continues to build on important relationships in the worlds of film, theatre, dance, music, and visual art. The museum's current director is Andrea Grover, who was previously Curator of Special Projects of the Parrish Art Museum.
Helen O'Toole is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Zyzzyva, as well as the Chicago Tribune,The Irish Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and National Public Radio. Art writers frequently discuss the interplay in her work between abstraction, the evocation of otherworldly light, land and space, and a commitment to investigating meaning through a painting process akin to the processes of cultivation and excavation. Artforum critic James Yood wrote, "echoing the often inchoate quality of nature, her paint surges toward mystery and hints at a kind of chiaroscuro of the spirit"; curator Bonnie Laing-Malcomson suggests her "richly colored monumental paintings evoke the moody landscape of her rural Irish homeland, summoning the force of J. M. W. Turner and Mark Rothko." She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, a Contemporary Northwest Art Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (2013), among other awards. O'Toole lives in Seattle, Washington and is Professor of Art and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Program at the University of Washington.
Charlotte Park, also known as Charlotte Park Brooks (1918–2010) was an American abstract painter. She began work as a professional artist soon after the close of World War II, working in studios first in Manhattan and then in eastern Long Island. She was associated with and drew both support and inspiration from her husband James Brooks and other first-generation abstract expressionist artists, including particularly her neighbors, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. During most of her career she neither sought nor received praise from critics and collectors, but late in life was celebrated for the quality of her artistic achievements and had her work shown in prestigious solo and group exhibitions. At the end of her life a critic said, "Hers was a major gift all but stifled by a happily embraced domesticity and by the critical bullying of a brutally doctrinaire art world."
Amanda Church is an American artist known for abstract paintings that reference the human figure and other discernible elements. Her works straddle representational and formalist art traditions, suggesting recognizable body parts, objects, and perspectival elements in an otherwise abstract field. Church's distinctive use of contrasting style elements has been consistently noted by critics such as Hyperallergic's Cora Fisher, who described Church's work as "whimsically overruling the left-right brain dichotomy as well as the traditionally gendered axis that divides geometric and decorative art." Church received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017, among other awards. Her work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, ARTnews, Hyperallergic and Forbes Magazine. Her paintings have been exhibited in major U.S. cities as well as internationally, in galleries and museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum. She lives and works in New York.
Eric Dever is an American painter. His paintings are held in the collections of Grey Art Gallery New York University, the Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall Museum, and the Heckscher Museum of Art. Dever has exhibited throughout the United States since the early 1990s, including exhibitions in France, Hong Kong and Helsinki.
Francis Valentine O'Connor was an American art historian who was pioneering scholar of the visual art of the New Deal and an expert on the contemporary artist Jackson Pollock.
Harold Lehman (1913–2006) was an American artist known for his murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Colin Adriel Goldberg is an American visual artist known for his role in the development of Techspressionism.
