Editing Abstract expressionism (section)

=== World War II and the Post-War period ===

[[File:'Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental', oil on canvas painting by Richard Pousette-Dart, 1941-42, Metropolitan Museum of Art.jpg|thumb|[[Richard Pousette-Dart]], ''Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental,'' 1941–42]]

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 [[Nazism|Nazis]] for safe haven in the United States. Many of those who didn't flee perished. Among the artists and collectors who arrived in New York during the war (some with help from [[Varian Fry]]) were [[Hans Namuth]], [[Yves Tanguy]], [[Kay Sage]], [[Max Ernst]], [[Jimmy Ernst]], [[Peggy Guggenheim]], [[Leo Castelli]], [[Marcel Duchamp]], [[André Masson]], [[Roberto Matta]], [[André Breton]], [[Marc Chagall]], [[Jacques Lipchitz]], [[Fernand Léger]], and [[Piet Mondrian]]. A few artists, notably [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso]], [[Matisse]], and [[Pierre Bonnard]] remained in France and survived.

The post-war period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval, with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris, formerly the center of European culture and capital of the art world, the climate for art was a disaster, and New York replaced Paris as the new center of the art world. Post-war Europe saw the continuation of [[Surrealism]], [[Cubism]], [[Dada]], and the works of Matisse. Also in Europe, [[Outsider art|Art brut]],<ref>[[Jean Dubuffet]]: ''L’Art brut préféré aux arts culturels'' [1949](=engl in: ''Art brut. Madness and Marginalia'', special issue of ''Art & Text'', No. 27, 1987, p. 31–33)</ref> and [[Lyrical Abstraction]] or [[Tachisme]] (the European equivalent to abstract expressionism) took hold of the newest generation. [[Serge Poliakoff]], [[Nicolas de Staël]], [[Georges Mathieu]], [[Vieira da Silva]], [[Jean Dubuffet]], [[Yves Klein]], [[Pierre Soulages]] and [[Jean Messagier]], among others are considered important figures in post-war European painting.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22161138M/Younger_European_painters_a_selection.|title=Younger European painters, a selection.: [Exhibition] December 2, 1953 to February 21, 1954.|first=Solomon R. Guggenheim|last=Museum|date=December 23, 1953|ol=22161138M|via=The Open Library}}</ref> In the United States, a new generation of American artists began to emerge and to dominate the world stage, and they were called ''abstract expressionists''.

==== Gorky, Hofmann, and Graham ====

[[File:Gorky-The-Liver.jpg|thumb|left|[[Arshile Gorky]], ''The Liver is the Cock's Comb'' (1944), oil on canvas, 73{{fraction|1|4}} × 98" (186 × 249 cm) [[Albright–Knox Art Gallery]], [[Buffalo, New York]]. Gorky was an [[Armenians|Armenian]]-born American painter who had a seminal influence on abstract expressionism. De Kooning said: "I met a lot of artists — but then I met Gorky... He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head; remarkable. So I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends."<ref>''Willem de Kooning'' (1969) by [[Thomas B. Hess]]</ref>]]

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Matisse, Picasso, Surrealism, [[Miró]], [[Cubism]], [[Fauvism]], and early Modernism via eminent educators in the United States, including Hans Hofmann from Germany and John D. Graham from Ukraine. Graham's influence on American art during the early 1940s was particularly visible in the work of Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, and [[Richard Pousette-Dart]] among others. Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. His work as [[lyrical abstraction]]<ref name =dorment>Dorment, Richard. [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/7190303/Arshile-Gorky-A-Retrospective-at-Tate-Modern-review.html "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at Tate Modern, review"], ''[[The Daily Telegraph]]'', February 8, 2010. Retrieved May 24, 2010.</ref><ref>[http://www.artdaily.org/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36171&int_modo=1 Art Daily] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111227141320/http://www.artdaily.org/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36171&int_modo=1 |date=December 27, 2011 }} retrieved May 24, 2010</ref><ref>[http://artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=37112 "L.A. Art Collector Caps Two Year Pursuit of Artist with Exhibition of New Work"], ArtDaily. Retrieved May 26, 2010. "Lyrical Abstraction ... has been applied at times to the work of Arshile Gorky"</ref><ref>[http://www.tate.org.uk/about/pressoffice/pressreleases/2010/21322.htm "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective"], [[Tate]], February 9, 2010. Retrieved June 5, 2010.</ref><ref>Van Siclen, Bill. [http://www.projo.com/art/content/projo_20030710_artwrap10.5e2b3.html "Art scene by Bill Van Siclen: Part-time faculty with full-time talent"] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110622073303/http://www.projo.com/art/content/projo_20030710_artwrap10.5e2b3.html |date=June 22, 2011 }}, ''[[The Providence Journal]]'', July 10, 2003. Retrieved June 10, 2010.</ref> was a "new language.<ref name=dorment/> He "lit the way for two generations of American artists".<ref name=dorment/> The painterly spontaneity of mature works such as ''The Liver is the Cock's Comb'', ''The Betrothal II'', and ''One Year the Milkweed'' immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the [[New York School (art)|New York School]] have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence. The early work of [[Hyman Bloom]] was also influential.<ref name="chaet">{{cite journal|last1=Chaet|first1=Bernard|title=The Boston Expressionist School: A Painter's Recollections of the Forties|journal=Archives of American Art Journal|date=1980|volume=20|issue=1|page=28|jstor=1557495|publisher=The Smithsonian Institution|quote=[Thomas] Hess's favorite painter, Willem de Kooning...made it very clear to me in a conversation in 1954 that he and Jackson Pollock considered Bloom, whom they had discovered in ''Americans 1942'', 'the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America.'"|doi=10.1086/aaa.20.1.1557495|s2cid=192821072}}</ref> American artists also benefited from the presence of [[Piet Mondrian]], [[Fernand Léger]], Max Ernst, and the [[André Breton]] group, [[Pierre Matisse|Pierre Matisse's gallery]], and [[Peggy Guggenheim]]'s gallery [[The Art of This Century]], as well as other factors. Hans Hofmann in particular as teacher, mentor, and artist was both important and influential to the development and success of abstract expressionism in the United States. Among Hofmann's protégés was [[Clement Greenberg]], who became an enormously influential voice for American painting, and among his students was [[Lee Krasner]], who introduced her teacher, Hofmann, to her husband, Jackson Pollock.<ref>[http://www.hanshofmann.org/1940-1949, Hans Hofmann.org/1940-1949],</ref>

==== Pollock and Abstract influences ====

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. Like [[Picasso]]'s innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via [[Cubism]] and constructed sculpture, with influences as disparate as [[Navajo people|Navajo]] [[sand painting]]s, surrealism, Jungian analysis, and Mexican mural art,<ref>Appignanesi, Richard, et al., ''Introducing Postmodernism,'' Ikon Books, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2003, p. 30</ref> 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; linear skeins of paint dripped and thrown; drawing, staining, brushing; imagery and non-imagery—essentially took art-making beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism in general expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art.

The other abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Pollock, [[Willem de Kooning|de Kooning]], [[Franz Kline]], [[Mark Rothko|Rothko]], [[Philip Guston]], [[Hans Hofmann]], [[Clyfford Still]], [[Barnett Newman]], [[Ad Reinhardt]], [[Richard Pousette-Dart]], [[Robert Motherwell]], [[Peter Voulkos]], and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them.  The radical Anti-Formalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s including [[Fluxus]], [[Neo-Dada]], [[Conceptual art]], and the [[feminist art movement]] can be traced to the innovations of abstract expressionism. Rereadings into abstract art, done by art historians such as [[Linda Nochlin]],<ref>Nochlin, Linda, Ch.1 in: ''Women Artists at the Millennium'' (edited by C. Armstrong and C. de Zegher) MIT Press, 2006.</ref> [[Griselda Pollock]]<ref>Pollock, Griselda, ''Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive''. Routledge, 2007.</ref> and [[Catherine de Zegher]]<ref>De Zegher, Catherine, and Teicher, Hendel (eds.), ''3 X Abstraction''. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005.</ref> critically shows, however, that pioneer women artists who have produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by the official accounts of its history, but finally began to achieve long overdue recognition in the wake of the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Abstract expressionism emerged as a major art movement in New York City during the 1950s and thereafter several leading art galleries began to include the abstract expressionists in exhibitions and as regulars in their rosters. Some of those prominent 'uptown' galleries included: the [[Charles Egan Gallery]],<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xPBPAQAAIAAJ&q=%22charles+egan+gallery%22+abstract|title=George McNeil|last1=McNeil|first1=George|year=2008}}</ref> the [[Sidney Janis|Sidney Janis Gallery]],<ref>{{cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0uYCAAAAMBAJ&q=%22janis+gallery%22+abstract&pg=PA50|title=Janis Gallery abstract|work=New York Magazine|access-date=2016-03-20|date=January 31, 1972}}</ref> the [[Betty Parsons Gallery]],<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sNCJAwAAQBAJ&q=%22betty+parsons+gallery%22+abstract&pg=PA244|title=The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts|isbn=9781573441919|last1=Summers|first1=Claude J.|year=2004}}</ref> the [[Kootz Gallery]],<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YgALtJ2GKIUC&q=%22kootz+gallery%22+abstract&pg=PA302|title=New York Modern|isbn=9780801867934|last1=Scott|first1=William B.|last2=Rutkoff|first2=Peter M.|date=August 24, 2001}}</ref> the [[Tibor de Nagy Gallery]], the [[Stable Gallery]], the [[Leo Castelli|Leo Castelli Gallery]] as well as others; and several downtown galleries known at the time as the [[Tenth Street galleries]] exhibited many emerging younger artists working in the abstract expressionist vein.

==== Action painting ====

Action painting was a style widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, and is closely associated with abstract expressionism (some critics have used the terms [[action painting]] and abstract expressionism interchangeably). A comparison is often drawn between the American action painting and the French [[tachisme]].

The term was coined by the American critic [[Harold Rosenberg]] in 1952<ref>{{cite web
| url = http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=9798
| title = ''The American Action Painters''
| access-date=August 20, 2006
| last = Rosenberg
| first = Harold
| publisher = poetrymagazines.org.uk
}}</ref> and signaled a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of [[New York School (art)|New York School]] painters and critics. According to Rosenberg the canvas was "an arena in which to act". While abstract expressionists such as [[Jackson Pollock]], [[Franz Kline]] and [[Willem de Kooning]] had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena within which to come to terms with the act of creation, earlier critics sympathetic to their cause, like [[Clement Greenberg]], focused on their works' "objectness". To Greenberg, it was the physicality of the paintings' clotted and oil-caked surfaces that was the key to understanding them as documents of the artists' [[Existentialism|existential]] struggle.

[[File:'Boon' oil on canvas painting by James Brooks, 1957, Tate Gallery.jpg|thumb|''Boon'' by [[James Brooks (painter)|James Brooks]], 1957, [[Tate Gallery]]]]
Rosenberg's critique shifted the emphasis from the object to the struggle itself, with the finished painting being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art, which was in the act or process of the painting's creation. This spontaneous activity was the "action" of the painter, through arm and wrist movement, [[painterly]] gestures, brushstrokes, thrown paint, splashed, stained, scumbled and dripped. The painter would sometimes let the paint drip onto the canvas, while rhythmically dancing, or even standing in the canvas, sometimes letting the paint fall according to the subconscious mind, thus letting the [[Unconscious mind|unconscious]] part of the [[Psyche (psychology)|psyche]] assert and express itself. All this, however, is difficult to explain or interpret because it is a supposed unconscious manifestation of the act of pure creation.<ref>based (very) loosely on a lecture by Fred Orton at the Uni of Leeds and H. Geldzahler, ''New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, NY 1969''</ref>

In practice, the term abstract expressionism is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even applied to work which is not especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic [[action painting]]s, with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to De Kooning's violent and grotesque ''Women'' series. ''Woman V'' is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between 1950 and 1953 that depict a three-quarter-length female figure. He began the first of these paintings, ''Woman I'', in June 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, when the painting was abandoned unfinished. The art historian [[Meyer Schapiro]] saw the painting in de Kooning's studio soon afterwards and encouraged the artist to persist. De Kooning's response was to begin three other paintings on the same theme; ''Woman II'', ''[[Woman III]]'' and ''Woman IV''. During the summer of 1952, spent at [[East Hampton (town), New York|East Hampton]], de Kooning further explored the theme through drawings and pastels. He may have finished work on ''Woman I'' by the end of June, or possibly as late as November 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=47761&BioArtistIRN=25281&MnuID=2&GalID=1|title=International Paintings and Sculpture – Woman V|work=nga.gov.au|access-date=2016-03-20}}</ref> The ''Woman series'' are decidedly [[Figurative art|figurative paintings]].

Another important artist is [[Franz Kline]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/1/81|title=Painting Number 2 at MoMA}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://hyperallergic.com/66831/painting-at-the-speed-of-sight-franz-klines-rapid-transit/|title=Painting at the Speed of Sight: Franz Kline's Rapid Transit|first=Tim|last=Keane|date=March 16, 2013|website=Hyperallergic}}</ref> As with Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, Kline was labelled an "[[Action Painting|action painter]]" because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brushstrokes and use of canvas; as demonstrated by his painting ''Number 2'' (1954).<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.thoughtco.com/art-history-definition-action-painting-183188|title=Art History Definition: Action Painting|work=ThoughtCo|access-date=2018-05-04}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/1/81|title=Franz Kline, ''Number 2'' (1954), Museum of Modern Art, New York}}</ref><ref>[https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0520050150 Rudolf Arnheim, ''The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts''], University of California Press, 1983, pp. 71–72, {{ISBN|0520050150}}</ref>

Automatic writing was an important vehicle for action painters such as Kline (in his black and white paintings), Pollock, Mark Tobey and [[Cy Twombly]], who used gesture, surface, and line to create calligraphic, linear symbols and skeins that resemble language, and resonate as powerful manifestations from the [[Collective unconscious]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/abstract-expressionism-redefining-art-part-one/|title=Abstract Expressionism: Redefining Art, Part One &#124; Art History Unstuffed|first=Jeanne|last=Willette}}</ref><ref>[https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abex/hd_abex.htm Metropolitan Museum of Art Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Abstract Expressionism]</ref> [[Robert Motherwell]] in his ''Elegy to the Spanish Republic'' series painted powerful black and white paintings using gesture, surface and symbol evoking powerful emotional charges.<ref>[https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/489403 Metropolitan Museum of Art]</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79007|title=Robert Motherwell. Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 108. 1965-67 &#124; MoMA|website=The Museum of Modern Art}}</ref>

Meanwhile, other action painters, notably de Kooning, Gorky, [[Norman Bluhm]], [[Joan Mitchell]], and [[James Brooks (painter)|James Brooks]], used imagery via either abstract landscape or as expressionistic visions of the figure to articulate their highly personal and powerful evocations. James Brooks' paintings were particularly poetic and highly prescient in relationship to [[Lyrical Abstraction]] that became prominent in the late 1960s and the 1970s.<ref>The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, ''Lyrical Abstraction'', exhibition: April 5 through June 7, 1970, ''Statement of the exhibition''</ref>

==== Color field ====
[[Clyfford Still]], [[Barnett Newman]], [[Adolph Gottlieb]] and the serenely shimmering blocks of color in [[Mark Rothko]]'s work (which is not what would usually be called expressionist and which Rothko denied was abstract), are classified as abstract expressionists, albeit from what [[Clement Greenberg]] termed the [[Color field]] direction of abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann and [[Robert Motherwell]] can be comfortably described as practitioners of [[Action painting]] and Color field painting. In the 1940s [[Richard Pousette-Dart]]'s tightly constructed imagery often depended upon themes of mythology and mysticism; as did the paintings of Gottlieb, and Pollock in that decade as well.

Color Field painting initially referred to a particular type of abstract expressionism, especially the work of Rothko, Still, Newman, Motherwell, Gottlieb, [[Ad Reinhardt]] and several series of paintings by [[Joan Miró]]. Greenberg perceived Color Field painting as related to but different from Action painting. The Color Field painters sought to rid their art of superfluous rhetoric. Artists like Motherwell, Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, [[Hans Hofmann]], [[Helen Frankenthaler]], [[Sam Francis]], [[Mark Tobey]], and especially Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, whose masterpiece ''[[Vir heroicus sublimis]]'' is in the collection of [[MoMA]], used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general, these artists eliminated recognizable imagery, in the case of Rothko and Gottlieb sometimes using symbols and signs as a replacement of imagery.<ref>{{cite web|last=MoMA Learning|title=What is Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko|url=https://education.moma.org/moma/learningresources/cms_page/view/366521|access-date=February 28, 2014}}</ref> Certain artists quoted references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. In pursuing this direction of [[modern art]], artists wanted to present each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image.

In distinction to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks of abstract expressionists such as Pollock and de Kooning, the Color Field painters initially appeared to be cool and austere, effacing 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, which later in the 1960s [[Frank Stella]] in particular achieved in unusual ways with combinations of curved and straight edges. However, Color Field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive albeit in a different way from gestural abstract expressionism.

Although abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially in the [[New York School (art)|New York School]], and the [[San Francisco Bay area]]. 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). The canvas as the ''arena'' became a credo of Action painting, while the [[Picture plane#Integrity of the picture plane|''integrity of the picture plane'']] became a credo of the Color field painters. Younger artists began exhibiting their abstract expressionist related paintings during the 1950s as well including [[Alfred Leslie]], [[Sam Francis]], [[Joan Mitchell]], [[Helen Frankenthaler]], [[Cy Twombly]], [[Milton Resnick]], [[Michael Goldberg (painter)|Michael Goldberg]], [[Norman Bluhm]], [[Grace Hartigan]], [[Friedel Dzubas]], and [[Robert Goodnough]] among others.

[[File:Cyclops, 1947, William Baziotes.JPG|thumb|upright|[[William Baziotes]], ''Cyclops,'' 1947, oil on canvas, [[Chicago Art Institute]]. Baziotes' abstract expressionist works show the influence of [[Surrealism]]]]
Although Pollock is closely associated with Action Painting because of his style, technique, and his painterly ''touch'' and his physical application of paint, art critics have likened Pollock to both Action painting and color field painting. Another critical view advanced by Greenberg connects Pollock's allover canvasses to the large-scale ''[[Water Lilies]]'' of [[Claude Monet]] done during the 1920s. Art critics such as [[Michael Fried]], Greenberg and others have observed that the overall feeling in Pollock's most famous works – his ''drip'' paintings – read as vast fields of built-up linear elements. They note that these works often read as vast complexes of similarly-valued paint skeins and all-over fields of color and drawing, and are related to the mural-sized Monets which are similarly constructed of close-valued brushed and scumbled marks that also read as fields of color and drawing. Pollock's use of all-over composition lend a philosophical and a physical connection to the way the color field painters like Newman, Rothko and Still construct their unbroken and in Still's case broken surfaces. In several paintings that Pollock painted after his classic ''drip'' painting period of 1947–1950, he used the technique of staining fluid oil paint and house paint into raw canvas. During 1951 he produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings, and in 1952 he produced stain paintings using color. In his November 1952 exhibition at the [[Sidney Janis]] Gallery in New York City Pollock showed ''Number 12, 1952'', a large, masterful stain painting that resembles a brightly colored stained landscape (with an overlay of broadly dripped dark paint); the painting was acquired from the exhibition by [[Nelson Rockefeller]] for his personal collection.<ref>[http://ogs.ny.gov/esp/CT/History.asp Pollock #12 1952 at NY State Mall project] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140313223525/http://ogs.ny.gov/esp/CT/History.asp |date=March 13, 2014 }} Retrieved May 6, 2011</ref>

While [[Arshile Gorky]] is considered to be one of the founding fathers of abstract expressionism and a [[surrealist]], he was also one of the first painters of the [[New York School (art)|New York School]] who used the technique of ''staining.'' Gorky created broad fields of vivid, open, unbroken color that he used in many of his paintings as ''grounds.'' In Gorky's most effective and accomplished paintings between the years 1941–1948, he consistently used intense stained fields of color, often letting the paint run and drip, under and around his familiar lexicon of organic and biomorphic shapes and delicate lines. Another abstract expressionist whose works in the 1940s call to mind the stain paintings of the 1960s and the 1970s is [[James Brooks (painter)|James Brooks]]. Brooks regularly used stain as a technique in his paintings from the late 1940s. Brooks began diluting his [[oil paint]] in order to have fluid colors with which to pour and drip and stain into the mostly raw canvas that he used. These works often combined [[calligraphy]] and abstract shapes. During the final three decades of his career, [[Sam Francis]]' style of large-scale bright abstract expressionism was closely associated with Color field painting. His paintings straddled both camps within the abstract expressionist rubric, Action painting and Color Field painting.

Having seen Pollock's 1951 paintings of thinned black oil paint stained into raw canvas, Frankenthaler began to produce ''stain paintings'' in varied oil colors on raw canvas in 1952. Her most famous painting from that period is ''[[Mountains and Sea]]''. She is one of the originators of the Color Field movement that emerged in the late 1950s.<ref>[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87871332 'Color Field' Artists Found a Different Way] Retrieved August 3, 2010</ref> Frankenthaler also studied with [[Hans Hofmann]].

Hofmann's paintings are a symphony of color as seen in ''The Gate,'' 1959–1960. He was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the US. Hofmann, who came to the United States from Germany in the early 1930s, brought with him the legacy of [[Modernism]]. As a young artist in pre-First World War Paris, Hofmann worked with [[Robert Delaunay]], and he knew firsthand the innovative work of both Picasso and Matisse. Matisse's work had an enormous influence on him, and on his understanding of the expressive language of color and the potentiality of abstraction. Hofmann was one of the first theorists of color field painting, and his theories were influential to artists and to critics, particularly to Clement Greenberg, as well as to others during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1953 [[Morris Louis]] and [[Kenneth Noland]] were both profoundly influenced by [[Helen Frankenthaler]]'s stain paintings after visiting her studio in New York City. Returning to Washington, DC., they began to produce the major works that created the ''color field movement'' in the late 1950s.<ref name="Fenton1">Fenton, Terry. "[http://www.sharecom.ca/fenton/louis.html Morris Louis]". sharecom.ca. Retrieved December 8, 2008</ref>

In 1972 then [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]] [[curator]] [[Henry Geldzahler]] said:
{{blockquote|Clement Greenberg included the work of both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in a show that he did at the Kootz Gallery in the early 1950s. Clem was the first to see their potential. He invited them up to New York in 1953, I think it was, to Helen's studio to see a painting that she had just done called Mountains and Sea, a very, very beautiful painting, which was in a sense, out of Pollock and out of Gorky. It also was one of the first stain pictures, one of the first large field pictures in which the stain technique was used, perhaps the first one. Louis and Noland saw the picture unrolled on the floor of her studio and went back to Washington, DC., and worked together for a while, working at the implications of this kind of painting.<ref>{{citation |last=De Antonio |first=Emile |title=Painters Painting, a Candid History of The Modern Art Scene 1940–1970 |page=[https://archive.org/details/painterspainting0000unse_27/page/79 79] |publisher=Abbeville Press |year=1984 |isbn=0-89659-418-1 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/painterspainting0000unse_27/page/79 }}</ref><ref>{{citation |last=Carmean |first=E. A. |title=Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective |type=Exhibition Catalog |pages=[https://archive.org/details/helenfrankenthal0000carm/page/12 12–20] |publisher=Harry N. Abrams |others=in conjunction with The Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth |isbn=0-8109-1179-5 |url=https://archive.org/details/helenfrankenthal0000carm/page/12 |year=1989 }}</ref>}}

==== In the 1960s after abstract expressionism ====
{{main|Post-painterly abstraction|Color Field painting|Lyrical Abstraction|Arte Povera|Process Art|Minimal art|Postminimalism|Western painting}}
In [[Abstract art|abstract painting]] during the 1950s and 1960s, several new directions, like the [[Hard-edge painting]] exemplified by [[John McLaughlin (artist)|John McLaughlin]], emerged. Meanwhile, as a reaction against the subjectivism of abstract expressionism, other forms of [[Geometric abstraction]] began to appear in artist studios and in radical [[avant-garde]] circles. Greenberg became the voice of ''Post-painterly abstraction;'' by curating an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964. [[Color field painting]], [[Hard-edge painting]] and [[Lyrical Abstraction]]<ref>Aldrich, Larry. Young Lyrical Painters, Art in America, v.57, n6, November–December 1969, pp.104–113.</ref> emerged as radical new directions.