Abstract Expressionism During The Great Depression

Abstract Expressionism began in the periods of the 1940s and 1950s in New York. "It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academic painting. However, there is no such thing as good painting about nothing." which is described by Mark Rothko, who was an early abstract expressionist. Its development started back to the 1930s which were being shaped by social, political and geographical calamities: internally, by the Great Depression in 1929, the establishment of Popular Front in the mid 1930s; externally, by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and the outbreak of WW2 in 1939; geographically, New York was described as an “open country”. Above all, they were the important factors which led to the development of Abstract Expressionism.

The Great Depression in 1929 after the WW1 was the first event that assume the new urgency of turning the earlier directions in American painting. The two main American painting groups were the regionalist and the social realist. During the Great Depression, the economically breakdown caused the high unemployment of the artists. In respond to this temper, most of them chose to paint in socially oriented style. By the 1933, the artists who were unemployed joined the Unemployed Artist’s Group, the mother of Artists’
The Museum of Modern Art mounted shows including "Cubism and Abstract Art," "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism," and a major retrospective of Pablo Picasso. And 1939, the opening of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, called the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum later, which blustered an vital collection of Wassily Kandinsky's works. Above all these activities, New York's artists were extremely knowledgeable about the modern art’s trends in Europe. Although they felt inferiority, these were slowly overcome in the