Abstract
Expressionism was the first major new abstract style developed
in the United States after the influx of refugee artists from
Europe in the years just before World War II. The movement was
centered in New York City but rapidly spread throughout the Western
world. In part as a response to the chaos of the time in which
they lived, Abstract Expressionist artists turned as had the Dadaists
before them, against the use of reason. They tried to broaden
their artistic processes to express what Carl Jung called the
"collective unconscious" by adopting the methods of
Surrealist improvisation and using their collective minds as open
channels through which the forces of the unconscious could make
themselves visible.
The
Abstract Expressionists saw themselves as leaders in the quest
to find the path to the future. The New York artists viewed their
art as a weapon in the struggle to maintain their humanity in
the midst of the world’s increasing insanity.
To create, they turned inward. Their works had a look of rough
spontaneity and exhibited a refreshing energy; their content was
intended to be grasped intuitively by each viewer, in a state
free from structured thinking. Abstract Expressionist artists
believed their work could help to counter the forces of dislocation
by reawakening in people a sense of interconnectedness with all
living things. As the painter Robert Motherwall eloquently wrote:
"The
emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of
feeling in the world ...From their perspective, it is the social
world that tends to appear irrational and absurd...Nothing as
drastic as abstract art could have come into existence save as
the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need.
The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct,
subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic. If a painting does not
make a human contact, it is nothing. But the audience is also
responsible. Through pictures our passions touch. Pictures are
vehicles of passion, of all kinds and orders, not pretty luxuries
like sports cars. In our society, the capacity to give and receive
passion is limited. For this reason, the act of painting is deep
human necessity, not the production of a hand-made commodity."
**
--
all text excerpted from Gardner’s Art Through the Ages,
Volume II, Ninth Edition, New York : Hardcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1991, p1032.
** Motherwell quote excerpted from Frank O’Hara, Robert
Motherwell, New York : Museum of Modern Art, 1965, pp 45, 50.
