The America of the 1940s, from which Abstract Expressionism emerged, was still reeling from the collapse of world order triggered by World War II. This was a major influence on the country’s artists – many of whom still remembered The Great Depression and its relief programs like the Works Progress Administration which had afforded them the opportunity to develop a painting career, and they began searching for ways of responding to the uncertain climate.
The problem was that the two main art movements of the 1930s – namely, Regionalism and Social Realism – failed to satisfy their desire for a break with current thinking. In this, they were strongly influenced by the arrival of numerous modern artist refugees from Europe, whose radical approach to art opened up a series of new possibilities.
Although it is the accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not an accurate description of the body of work created by these artists. Indeed, the movement comprised many different painterly styles varying in both technique and quality of expression. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings share several broad characteristics. They are basically abstract—i.e., they depict forms not drawn from the visible world. They emphasize free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exercise considerable freedom of technique and execution to attain this goal, with a particular emphasis laid on the exploitation of the variable physical character of paint to evoke expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They show similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of that paint in a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with a similar intent of expressing the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display the abandonment of conventionally structured composition built up out of discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. And finally, the paintings fill large canvases to give these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing power.
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