Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.
Monochromatic painting has been an important component of avant-garde visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Painters have created the exploration of one color, examining values changing across a surface, texture, and nuance, expressing a wide variety of emotions, intentions, and meanings in many different forms. From geometric precision to expressionism, the monochrome has proved to be a durable idiom in Contemporary art.
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 Washington Color School, also known as the Washington, D.C., Color School, was an art movement starting during the 1950s–1970s in Washington, D.C., in the United States, built of abstract expressionist artists. The movement emerged during a time when society, the arts, and people were changing quickly. The founders of this movement are Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, however four more artists were part of the initial art exhibition in 1965.
Donald K. Sultan is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, particularly well-known for large-scale still life paintings and the use of industrial materials such as tar, enamel, spackle and vinyl tiles. He has been exhibiting internationally in prominent museums and galleries, and his works are included in important museum collections all over the globe. Sultan is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for his artistic achievements.
Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting:
Sylvia Sleigh was a Welsh-born naturalised American realist painter who lived and worked in New York City. She is known for her role in the feminist art movement and especially for reversing traditional gender roles in her paintings of nude men, often using conventional female poses from historical paintings by male artists like Diego Vélazquez, Titian, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Her most well-known subjects were art critics, feminist artists, and her husband, Lawrence Alloway.
Anne Ryan (1889–1954) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist associated with the New York School. Her first contact with the New York City avant-garde came in 1941 when she joined the Atelier 17, a famous printmaking workshop that the British artist Stanley William Hayter had established in Paris in the 1930s and then brought to New York when France fell to the Nazis. The great turning point in Ryan's development occurred after the war, in 1948. She was 57 years old when she saw the collages of Kurt Schwitters at the Rose Fried Gallery, in New York City, in 1948. She right away dedicated herself to this newly discovered medium. Since Anne Ryan was a poet, according to Deborah Solomon, in Kurt Schwitters’s collages “she recognized the visual equivalent of her sonnets – discrete images packed together in an extremely compressed space.” When six years later Ryan died, her work in this medium numbered over 400 pieces.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
Cora Cohen is an American artist whose works include paintings, drawings, photographs, and altered x rays. Cohen is most known for her abstract paintings and is often identified as continuing the tradition of American Abstraction. The New York Times' critic Michael Brenson wrote of her 1984 exhibition, Portraits of Women: "The works are dense, brooding and yet elated. The turbulence of the paint not only looks but also feels like freedom." Cohen interviewed many other artists also associated with continuing the tradition of American Abstraction for Bomb Magazine including; Ralph Humphrey, Dona Nelson, Craig Fisher, Carl Ostendarp and Joan Mitchell. Her work has also been identified with traditions of European abstraction, and specifically German abstraction, including the work of Wols, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter. She began exhibiting in Germany in the early nineties and continues to show at some of its most prestigious institutions.
20th-century Western painting begins with the heritage of late-19th-century painters Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others who were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck, revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Matisse's second version of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.
Jane Wilson was an American painter associated with both landscape painting and expressionism. She lived and worked in New York City and Water Mill, New York.
Frederick Spratt was an American artist and educator, best known for his color theory paintings.
Melissa Miller is an American painter who is best known for what Art in America called "raucous allegorical paintings" of animals that balance storytelling, psychological insight and behavioral observation with technical virtuosity and formal rigor. She rose to prominence during a rebirth in figurative painting and narrative content in the early 1980s championed by curators such as Marcia Tucker and Barbara Rose, who both selected Miller for prominent surveys. Rose identified Miller among a group of iconoclastic "rule breakers," describing her work as "a wild kingdom … gone slightly berserk" in the struggle for survival, whose intensity recalled Delacroix. In a later Artforum review, Donald Kuspit called Miller's paintings "apocalyptic allegories" executed with meticulous old-master methods that articulated psychic states, existential problems and ecological concerns. Miller has exhibited at museums throughout the United States, including the Whitney Museum, New Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Hirshhorn Museum. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Albright-Knox Gallery and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others, and she has received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and Texas Artist of the Year Award. Miller lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Myron Stout (1908–1987) was an American abstract painter whose geometric paintings and drawings bridged the styles of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.
Alicia McCarthy is an American painter. She is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement. Her work is considered to have Naïve or Folk character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other found materials. She is currently based in Oakland, California.
Boston Expressionism is an arts movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration strong enough that Boston Figurative Expressionism is sometimes used as an alternate term to distinguish it from abstract expressionism, with which it overlapped.
Stephanie Rose, is an American painter known for dramatic non-narrative abstract paintings composed of diverse passages including representational imagery and for portraiture in which the highly recognizable subjects appear in settings related to her work in abstraction; both, she has said, involve a "combination of historical and existential perspectives". Rose’s reputation was established as an abstract painter; her work in portraiture began late in her career in 1996. Exhibitions of her work typically include both modes of painting of which she has remarked, "Overall, the pivotal aspect for communicating meaning in my work is the investment of a theatrical sense of psychological presence in the paintings."
Despina Stokou is a contemporary artist, writer and curator based in Los Angeles, California. She primarily produces gestural, expressive paintings, often large and displaying vivid color, that include layered collage elements like cut paper letters spelling out pointed phrases and topical passages that tumble and pile up across her canvases.
Jill Nathanson is an artist in New York City associated with color field painting.
