abstract expressionism

American  

Sometimes Abstract Expressionism

noun

1. a movement in experimental, nonrepresentational painting originating in the U.S. in the 1940s, with sources in earlier movements, and embracing many individual styles marked in common by freedom of technique, a preference for dramatically large canvases, and a desire to give spontaneous expression to the unconscious.

---

abstract expressionism British  

noun

1. a school of painting in New York in the 1940s that combined the spontaneity of expressionism with abstract forms in unpremeditated, apparently random, compositions See also action painting tachisme

---

abstract expressionism Cultural  

1. A school of art that flourished primarily from the 1940s to the 1960s, noted for its large-scale, nonrepresentational works by artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

---

Other Word Forms

• abstract expressionist noun

Etymology

Origin of abstract expressionism

An Americanism dating back to 1950–55

Example Sentences

From abstract expressionism to pop art, the collection at the museum serves as a time capsule of pivotal artistic movements.

From BBC

“She was influenced by abstract expressionism, and she was influenced by the people at the time who were also painting in the neo-expressionist movement,” Casselli said.

From Los Angeles Times

She was part of the group of postwar artists — Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning — written about in the book “Ninth Street Women,” which details how abstract expressionism was born in this country and how women were a crucial part of it.

From Los Angeles Times

The first wave of minimalism in America emerged as a postwar avant-garde that sought to extinguish artist subjectivity in favor of the object — a rejection of the excesses of self-expression and of the cult of genius that had come to define Abstract Expressionism and other movements of the 1940s and ’50s.

From New York Times

Frank Stella, whose laconic pinstripe “black paintings” of the late 1950s closed the door on Abstract Expressionism and pointed the way to an era of cool minimalism, died on Saturday at his home in the West Village of Manhattan.

From New York Times