In the summer of 1950, photographer Hans Namuth visited Jackson Pollock's barn studio in Springs, Long Island, and captured something the art world had never seen. Pollock stood over a massive canvas laid flat on the floor, flinging house paint from sticks, trowels, and hardened brushes in looping arcs. He danced around the canvas, dripping and splattering, never touching the surface with a conventional brush. The resulting photographs became iconic — but the paintings themselves were even more startling. They had no center, no focal point, no recognizable image. They were fields of pure energy, and they changed the trajectory of Western art.
Abstract Expressionism was the first major art movement to originate in the United States rather than Europe. Emerging in New York City during the late 1940s, it encompassed radically different styles — from Pollock's chaotic drip paintings to Mark Rothko's luminous, hovering rectangles of color — united by a shared commitment to large-scale abstraction and intense personal expression. The movement declared that a painting did not need to represent anything outside itself. The act of making it, the emotions embedded in the process, and the viewer's direct experience of color, scale, and surface were enough.
In this guide, you will learn what Abstract Expressionism actually looked like, why it mattered historically, and how to appreciate these often-challenging works when you encounter them in museums.
What Is Abstract Expressionism?
Abstract Expressionism is an art movement that developed in New York City in the 1940s and dominated American art through the 1950s. The name, coined by critic Robert Coates in 1946, combines two ideas: abstraction (no recognizable subject) and expressionism (art driven by inner emotion rather than external observation). The artists themselves generally disliked the label — Rothko insisted he was not an abstractionist at all — but it stuck.
The movement is sometimes divided into two broad tendencies:
Action Painting — Artists like Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline emphasized the physical act of painting. Their canvases record energetic gestures — drips, slashes, sweeping brushstrokes — that make the creative process visible.
Color Field Painting — Artists like Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still created large areas of flat or subtly modulated color designed to envelop the viewer in a meditative, emotional experience.
Despite these differences, all Abstract Expressionists shared certain convictions: art should be monumental in scale, deeply personal in content, and free from the obligation to depict the visible world. They believed painting could communicate profound human truths through pure visual means — color, form, gesture, and texture.
Historical Context: Why New York, Why Now?
Abstract Expressionism did not appear from nowhere. It emerged from a specific set of historical circumstances that made New York City the center of the art world for the first time.
The European Exile
During the 1930s and 1940s, the rise of fascism drove many of Europe's leading artists and intellectuals to the United States. Piet Mondrian, Max Ernst, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger all settled in New York. Their presence gave American artists direct access to the most advanced European movements — Surrealism, Cubism, and geometric abstraction — that had previously been available only through books and occasional exhibitions.
Surrealism proved especially influential. The Surrealist technique of automatism — allowing the hand to move freely without conscious control — gave the Abstract Expressionists a method for tapping into unconscious emotion. Pollock's drip technique is essentially automatism taken to its logical extreme.
Postwar Anxiety and Existentialism
World War II and the Holocaust shattered faith in progress, reason, and civilization. Artists who had lived through the Depression and the war felt that traditional representational art was inadequate to express the trauma and moral complexity of the modern world. Existentialist philosophy, particularly the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus about individual authenticity in an absurd universe, resonated deeply with the New York painters. If life had no inherent meaning, then each person — each artist — had to create meaning through their own actions. Painting became an existential act.
Jackson Pollock's studio barn in Springs, Long Island. The paint-splattered floor is itself a record of Pollock's action painting process. Photo by Guenther, 2007. Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Major Abstract Expressionists
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)
Pollock is the movement's most famous figure, largely due to those Namuth photographs that made him an unlikely celebrity. His "drip paintings," created between 1947 and 1950, abandoned the easel entirely. Working on unstretched canvas spread across the studio floor, Pollock used gravity and bodily movement to distribute paint in complex, layered webs. Paintings like "Number 1A, 1948" and "Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)" are enormous — some over seventeen feet wide — and have no up, down, or center. They immerse you in a field of interlaced gestures that records every movement of the artist's body.
Pollock studied under Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, experimented with Surrealist automatism, and underwent Jungian psychoanalysis — all of which fed into his revolutionary technique. He struggled with alcoholism throughout his life and died in a car crash at age forty-four, cementing his status as art's tragic rebel.
Mark Rothko (1903–1970)
If Pollock represents the explosive, physical side of Abstract Expressionism, Rothko represents the contemplative, spiritual side. Beginning around 1949, Rothko developed his signature format: large canvases with two or three soft-edged rectangles of color stacked vertically, hovering against a colored ground. Paintings like "No. 61 (Rust and Blue)" and the Seagram Murals are not illustrations of emotions — Rothko insisted they are emotions, made visible through color relationships.
Rothko wanted viewers to stand close to his large canvases and be surrounded by color. "I paint very large pictures," he said. "I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however — I think it applies to other painters I know — is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human." The Rothko Chapel in Houston, completed after his death, is the ultimate realization of this vision — a non-denominational chapel where fourteen dark paintings create an environment of profound stillness.
Willem de Kooning (1904–1997)
De Kooning bridged the gap between abstraction and figuration more aggressively than any other Abstract Expressionist. His "Woman" series (1950–1953), featuring ferocious, grinning female figures rendered with violent, slashing brushwork, shocked the art world — both because of their apparent hostility toward women and because they reintroduced recognizable imagery at a time when pure abstraction was considered more advanced. De Kooning's technique was extraordinary: he would build up, scrape down, and rebuild passages repeatedly, creating surfaces of incredible richness and energy.
Franz Kline (1910–1962)
Kline is known for enormous black-and-white paintings that look like magnified brushstrokes — bold, structural, and architecturally powerful. Paintings like "Mahoning" (1956) suggest steel girders, bridges, and the industrial landscape of his native Pennsylvania, though Kline insisted they were abstract. His apparently spontaneous compositions were actually carefully planned through small preparatory sketches projected onto large canvases.
Clyfford Still, "1957-D No. 1" (1957), oil on canvas. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Still's massive canvases with their ragged, flame-like color fields were a major influence on Color Field painting. Image: Public domain / Fair use, via Wikimedia Commons
Why Abstract Expressionism Matters
Abstract Expressionism's significance extends well beyond the paintings themselves. The movement permanently shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York. It established the idea that American culture could lead rather than follow European precedents. And it raised fundamental questions about what art is and what it can do that remain relevant today.
Several specific contributions stand out:
Scale as content — Before Abstract Expressionism, large paintings were reserved for historical or religious subjects. Pollock, Rothko, and their peers proved that abstraction could be monumental, creating an immersive physical experience for the viewer.
Process as subject — Action painters made the act of creation visible in the finished work. This idea — that how a painting is made matters as much as what it shows — influenced performance art, conceptual art, and every subsequent movement that prioritizes process.
Emotional directness — By stripping away representation, Abstract Expressionism aimed for a more direct emotional communication. Rothko's color fields do not tell you a story; they put you in a state of feeling. This ambition to affect viewers viscerally influenced installation art, light art, and immersive environments.
Artistic freedom — The movement established the principle that artists could work in any style, any medium, and at any scale they chose. There were no more rules about what a painting should look like. This radical freedom opened the door to everything from Pop Art to Minimalism to digital art.
How to Look at Abstract Expressionist Paintings
Many museum visitors feel intimidated by Abstract Expressionism. "My kid could paint that" is the most common dismissal. Here are strategies for engaging with these works more productively.
Give it time — Spend at least two full minutes with a single painting before deciding anything about it. Abstract art rewards slow looking.
Stand at different distances — These paintings were designed to be experienced at multiple distances. Stand close enough that the painting fills your peripheral vision, then step back to see the overall composition.
Pay attention to your body — Notice your physical response. Does Rothko's deep red make your chest feel warm? Does Pollock's tangled web make your eyes move restlessly? These physical responses are the content of the work.
Look at the surface — Many Abstract Expressionist paintings have extraordinary physical surfaces. The layering, scraping, dripping, and building up of paint creates textures that you cannot appreciate in reproductions.
Forget meaning, embrace experience — Do not ask "what does it mean?" Ask "what does it do to me?" These artists wanted to communicate emotion directly through visual means. Let the color, scale, and energy of the painting affect you without trying to decode a message.
For more practical gallery strategies, read our guide to how to visit an art museum.
Final Thoughts
Abstract Expressionism was a watershed moment in art history — the point where painting turned decisively inward, away from depicting the external world and toward expressing the internal landscape of human emotion, energy, and consciousness. Whether through Pollock's explosive drip paintings or Rothko's meditative color fields, these artists proved that abstraction could be as profound, moving, and meaningful as any figurative masterpiece.
The movement also permanently changed the geography of art. Before Abstract Expressionism, serious art happened in Paris. After it, New York became the undisputed capital of the contemporary art world — a position it held for decades and arguably still holds today.
Ready to explore more of art history's major movements? Read about how Impressionism broke academic rules, or discover the evolution of art styles from Realism to Contemporary. Understanding how each movement responds to what came before is the key to seeing art history as a living conversation rather than a dusty timeline.
