abstract expressionism

noun

1. a movement in experimental, nonrepresentational painting originating in the U.S. in the 1940s, with sources in earlier movements, and embracing many individual styles marked in common by freedom of technique, a preference for dramatically large canvases, and a desire to give spontaneous expression to the unconscious.

abstract expressionism

noun

1. a school of painting in New York in the 1940s that combined the spontaneity of expressionism with abstract forms in unpremeditated, apparently random, compositions See also action painting tachisme

abstract expressionism

1. A school of art that flourished primarily from the 1940s to the 1960s, noted for its large-scale, nonrepresentational works by artists such as Willem de Kooning , Jackson Pollock , and Mark Rothko .

Other Words From

• abstract expressionist noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of abstract expressionism¹

An Americanism dating back to 1950–55

Example Sentences

She was part of the group of postwar artists — Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning — written about in the book “Ninth Street Women,” which details how abstract expressionism was born in this country and how women were a crucial part of it.

From Los Angeles Times

The first wave of minimalism in America emerged as a postwar avant-garde that sought to extinguish artist subjectivity in favor of the object — a rejection of the excesses of self-expression and of the cult of genius that had come to define Abstract Expressionism and other movements of the 1940s and ’50s.

From New York Times

Frank Stella, whose laconic pinstripe “black paintings” of the late 1950s closed the door on Abstract Expressionism and pointed the way to an era of cool minimalism, died on Saturday at his home in the West Village of Manhattan.

From New York Times

But it’s also possible to see these works as filtering the domesticity of the School of Paris painting through Abstract Expressionism’s often raw boldness.

From New York Times

In all that time, the Biennale has weathered seismic social shifts: the rise and fall of European fascism, the beginning and end of the Cold War, and countless other conflicts, as well as the advent of Futurism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

From New York Times