Abstract Expressionism: Gesture, Field, and the New York School (1940s-1950s)

In 1943, Jackson Pollock painted a canvas nearly twenty feet long. He called it Mural. Peggy Guggenheim had commissioned it for the entrance hall of her East 57th Street townhouse, and she gave him a deadline of three months. Pollock finished it in one night, according to legend, though conservation research has since shown it took longer. The painting is a wall of swirling black paint, figures dissolving into gesture, the entire surface covered in a continuous rhythm of marks that do not stop at the edges. It was the painting that announced Abstract Expressionism as a force, and it is now in the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, a gift from Peggy Guggenheim herself.

Abstract Expressionism was the first American art movement to achieve international influence. It emerged in New York City in the late 1940s and peaked in the 1950s. The artists associated with it, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Clyfford Still, rejected representational subject matter in favor of large-scale abstract paintings that emphasized the physical act of painting, the emotional intensity of color, and the scale of the canvas itself. The movement is generally divided into two tendencies: action painting, which emphasized gesture and the physical application of paint, and color field painting, which used large areas of flat color to produce contemplative or spiritual effects.

This entry covers what Abstract Expressionism was, how it emerged from the wartime New York art scene, which artists defined it, and how to recognize it in a museum. In October 2026, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous," the first major New York exhibition dedicated to either artist in over twenty years and the first joint exhibition anywhere to cover the entirety of both careers. Read the announcement at Artnet News.

What Is Abstract Expressionism?

Abstract Expressionism is not a single style. It is a loose grouping of artists who shared certain convictions: that painting should be large, that it should be abstract, that it should express something personal and emotional rather than describe the visible world, and that the physical properties of paint and canvas were as important as any image. The critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting" in a 1952 essay in ARTnews, describing the canvas as "an arena in which to act" rather than a surface to be decorated. The critic Clement Greenberg argued that modern painting should emphasize its own medium: flatness, color, the physical fact of paint on canvas. These two critical frameworks, Rosenberg's existential drama and Greenberg's formalism, shaped how Abstract Expressionism was understood for decades.

The movement had two main branches. Action painting, associated with Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline, emphasized visible brushwork, physical energy, and the trace of the artist's hand. Pollock's drip paintings, made by pouring and flinging paint onto a canvas laid on the floor, are the most extreme example: the painting is a record of the artist's movements around and across the canvas. Color field painting, associated with Rothko, Newman, and Still, used large expanses of color to produce a meditative or sublime response in the viewer. Rothko's paintings from the 1950s consist of two or three soft-edged rectangles of color floating on a colored ground, vibrating at the boundaries where one color meets another.

Historical Context and Origins

Abstract Expressionism emerged from a specific set of circumstances in New York during and after World War II. The rise of fascism in Europe had driven a wave of emigre artists to New York, including Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Piet Mondrian. The presence of these European modernists, particularly the Surrealists, gave younger American artists direct access to avant-garde ideas that they had previously known only through reproduction. Surrealism's emphasis on automatism, the idea of making art by bypassing conscious control, was a direct influence on Pollock's drip technique and on the automatic drawing that Rothko and others experimented with in the early 1940s.

The dealer Peggy Guggenheim was the central institutional figure. Her gallery, Art of This Century, opened on West 57th Street in 1942 in a space designed by the architect Frederick Kiesler. The gallery showed Surrealist and Cubist works from Guggenheim's collection alongside solo exhibitions of young American artists, including Pollock's first solo show in 1943. Guggenheim commissioned Mural from Pollock and provided him a monthly stipend, allowing him to paint full-time. She also gave Lee Krasner her first solo exhibition in 1945. Krasner and Pollock married in 1945, and Guggenheim loaned them the money for a down payment on a house in Springs, East Hampton, now the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, a National Historic Landmark.

The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was another formative influence. From 1935 to 1943, the WPA employed thousands of artists, including Pollock, de Kooning, Krasner, and Rothko, to paint murals in public buildings. The WPA gave these artists income and exposure to large-scale work, which prepared them for the monumental canvases of the 1950s. The program ended in 1943, and the postwar period saw these artists transition from government employment to the emerging commercial gallery system.

The Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2025 with "Masters of New York: The Generation of Rothko, Pollock, and Krasner," the first exhibition in Korea to focus on Abstract Expressionism. Drawing from the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York, it featured 21 artists and framed the movement as the moment when American art entered the long line of European art history. Read more at ACC.

Key Artists and Pioneers

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

Pollock is the defining figure of Abstract Expressionism. His drip paintings of 1947-1950, including Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Lavender Mist: Number 1 (1950, National Gallery of Art, Washington), were made by pouring industrial paint onto unstretched canvas laid on the floor of his barn in Springs, using sticks, hardened brushes, and his hands to direct the flow. The paintings have no center, no focal point, no up or down. The paint covers every inch of the surface in a dense web of overlapping lines. Pollock stopped drip painting in 1951 and returned to more figurative work before dying in a car crash in 1956 at age 44.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

Rothko is the defining figure of color field painting. His mature works, from the early 1950s onward, consist of two or three large rectangles of color floating on a colored ground. No. 61 (Rust and Blue) (1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and Orange and Yellow (1956, Albright-Knox Art Gallery) use color to produce what Rothko described as an experience of basic human emotions: "tragedy, ecstasy, doom." Rothko's Seagram Murals, commissioned in 1958 for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York, were withdrawn by the artist and are now divided between the Tate in London, the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Japan, and the National Gallery in Washington. In 2026, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents "Rothko in Florence," tracing the artist's entire career with over 70 works from MoMA, the Met, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the National Gallery. The exhibition explores Rothko's 1950 visit to Florence, where Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco and Michelangelo's Laurentian Library influenced the Seagram Murals. Read more at Palazzo Strozzi.

Lee Krasner (1908-1984)

Krasner was one of the most formidable painters of the New York School, though for decades she was typecast as "Mrs. Jackson Pollock." Her "Little Images" series of the late 1940s, small paintings thickly covered in abstract symbols, are among the most significant contributions to Abstract Expressionism. Her "Umber" series (1959-1961), painted after Pollock's death, uses large, sweeping gestures of brown and white paint that are more physically aggressive than anything Pollock produced. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2026 exhibition "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous" presents the two artists as equals, with curator David Breslin stating: "These artists are equals, partners in life, giants in the history of art, and revolutionaries who defined what abstraction could be." Read more at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

De Kooning straddled abstraction and figuration. His Woman series (1950-1953), including Woman I (1950-1952, Museum of Modern Art, New York), combines aggressive brushwork with a recognizable female figure that is simultaneously painted, drawn, and gouged into the surface. De Kooning's refusal to commit fully to abstraction made him the most controversial figure in the movement. His late paintings from the 1970s, made during a period of declining health, are sparse, ribbon-like abstractions that some critics consider his most beautiful work.

Barnett Newman (1905-1970)

Newman's paintings are defined by what he called "zips": vertical lines that divide large fields of color. Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1951, Museum of Modern Art, New York) is a seventeen-foot-wide red canvas divided by five vertical zips of varying widths. Newman insisted that viewers stand close to the painting, so that the color filled their peripheral vision. The effect is immersive: the painting stops being an object you look at and becomes an environment you inhabit.

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992)

Mitchell brought Abstract Expressionism to France. She moved to Paris in 1959 and later settled in Vetheuil, near Monet's garden at Giverny. Her paintings, including City Landscape (1955, Art Institute of Chicago) and Salut Tom (1991), use vigorous brushwork and layered color to evoke landscapes without depicting them. Mitchell's work has gained increasing recognition in recent years as the canon of Abstract Expressionism expands to include women and artists who worked outside New York.

How to Spot Abstract Expressionism in a Painting

Look for scale first. Abstract Expressionist paintings are big. Pollock's Autumn Rhythm is eight by seventeen feet. Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis is seven by seventeen feet. Rothko's late paintings are often six feet tall or more. The size is not incidental. These paintings are meant to envelop the viewer, to create a physical relationship between the body and the canvas.

Then look at the surface. Action paintings show the evidence of their making: drips, splatters, brush marks, palette knife scrapes, areas where paint has been built up and areas where it has been scrubbed thin. Color field paintings are smoother, but look closely at the edges where one color meets another. Rothko feathered his edges so that the colors seem to float and vibrate. Newman's zips are hard-edged but often reveal brushwork up close.

Finally, look at the subject. If the painting does not depict anything recognizable, if it is paint on canvas and nothing else, it is likely Abstract Expressionist or influenced by Abstract Expressionism. The movement established the idea that a painting does not need a subject outside itself. The paint is the subject. The gesture is the subject. The color is the subject.

The Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts, presents "Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko: By the Sea" from June 30 to September 27, 2026, exploring the artistic bond between Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko through their shared summers in Gloucester. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., features over 82 works from the 1920s to the 1960s, many never before on public view. Read more at Cape Ann Museum.

Legacy and Influence

Abstract Expressionism shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York, where it has remained. The movement's emphasis on large-scale abstraction, personal expression, and the physical properties of paint shaped every subsequent development in American art. Pop Art reacted against Abstract Expressionism's seriousness and emotional intensity by embracing commercial imagery and cool detachment. Minimalism reacted against its gestural brushwork by producing clean, geometric objects with no trace of the artist's hand. Conceptual Art reacted against the emphasis on the physical object by making the idea the artwork.

But these reactions confirm the movement's centrality. You cannot react against something that does not matter. Abstract Expressionism set the terms for everything that came after it in American art, and its influence on painting worldwide continues to this day.

See Abstract Expressionism in Person

Abstract Expressionist paintings require physical presence. The scale, the surface texture, and the color relationships cannot be experienced in reproduction. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (actually at the Met), de Kooning's Woman I, and Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds Pollock's Autumn Rhythm and a major Rothko. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds Lavender Mist and the Rothko Room, where several paintings are installed together in a small, dimly lit space as Rothko intended. The Tate Modern in London holds the Seagram Murals in a dedicated room.

If you want to trace the movement, start at MoMA and the Met in New York, then visit the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs, Long Island, where you can see the barn where Pollock painted and the floor still stained with his drips. In October 2026, the Met's "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous" will bring together over 120 works from more than 80 lenders, including the Guggenheim, the Whitney, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou. For more on the movements that followed, read our entries on Pop Art and Minimalism, or explore our guide to how to read a painting to learn more about what to look for when standing in front of abstract art.