Abstract Expressionist Movement Analysis
In the years following World War II, the United States enjoyed an unprecedented economic and political boom. Amidst this growth, many artists and intellectuals had emigrated from Europe to the United States, bringing with them their own traditions and ideas, giving rise to the the Abstract Expressionist movement. Artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, sought to express emotions and individual feelings, and personified this through their diverse bodies of work by exploring new ways to reinvigorate and reinvent their medium of painting. Thus embodying a distinctly ‘individual - American’* element of confidence and creativity, so much that it was sponsored by the CIA because it could be held up as proof of the
creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power that the US had over Russian art during the propaganda war with the Soviet Union.
It was in this climate which led to the rethinking of the social order in the 1960s, eventually evoking a new breed of artists to reject the ideas of the Abstract Expressionists and adopt a new way of representing items from consumerist culture, favouring realism and impersonal expression.
creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power that the US had over Russian art during the propaganda war with the Soviet Union.
It was in this climate which led to the rethinking of the social order in the 1960s, eventually evoking a new breed of artists to reject the ideas of the Abstract Expressionists and adopt a new way of representing items from consumerist culture, favouring realism and impersonal expression.