Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been used previously in Germany's Der Sturm magazine in 1919. Abstract expressionism is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists who worked (mostly) in New York during the 1940s.
Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists' works, in reality most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. In many instances, abstract art implied expression of ideas concerning the spiritual, the unconscious, and the mind.
Abstract expressionism expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available in the creation of new works of art. Although Abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York and California. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, an "all-over" approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges).
Jackson Pollock's energetic action paintings, with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically from the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning. In contrast to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks of Pollock and de Kooning, the Color Field painters initially appeared to be cool and austere, eschewing the individual mark in favor of large, flat areas of color, which these artists considered to be the essential nature of visual abstraction, along with the actual shape of the canvas. In later years, Color Field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive, albeit in a different way from gestural abstract expressionism.
During the period leading up to and during World War II, modernist artists, writers, and poets, as well as important collectors and dealers, fled Europe and the onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. New York replaced Paris as the new center of the art world. The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, the modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, Joan Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early Modernism via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann from Germany and John D. Graham from Russia. Graham's influence on American art during the early 1940s was particularly visible in the work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. His works, such as The Liver is the Cock's Comb, The Betrothal II, and One Year the Milkweed, immediately prefigured abstract expressionism.
During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all contemporary art that followed him. To some extent, Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Pollock redefined what it was to produce art. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw canvas on the floor, where it could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials—essentially took artmaking beyond any prior boundary .
Jackson Pollock, No. 5, 1948
Jackson Pollack is known for his techniques in action painting, a style of abstract expressionism in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied.