What is

What does an Abstract Expressionist painting look like? Eleanor Nairne unpacks some of the aspects of this divergent movement.

Eleanor Nairne

Curator, Barbican

20th century

What is: Abstract Expressionism?

Abstract Expressionism is quite a loose term used to define a group of artists working around New York, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was not a term that was applied at the time, so it was not a term that they would have used for themselves.And it was so difficult for them to be able to see what a single definition might be that could link together someone like Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, through to someone like Helen Frankenthaler because it felt like their experiments in terms of colour, and form and idea and material were so divergent.

What do these words mean? We have no aesthetic definition of what is happening here. It was designed as a phrase to suggest something of the kind of emotion and expression that was going on, and within that there's a kind of suggestion that this relates to German Expressionism, to some of those European movements. But it was also the first moment that American artists were really working in a fully abstract, modernist vein.

But we can see some points of connection: there was a very strong interest in ideas of the inner self and how that inner space might be expressed within a canvas. So, rather than looking to the outside world, they were looking to an interior landscape.

One of the things we have come to associate with Abstract Expressionism is the idea of what's called a 'signature image'. So, we might think of the floating fields of colour in Mark Rothko, of the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, of Franz Kline's slashed black monochromatic mark-making. Each of these is an image that seems to us to be instantly recognisable.

Lee Krasner, by comparison, worked through many different styles and she was very clear about the fact that she considered it to be fundamentally inauthentic that you could have any one image that would express everything that she was as a woman, and as an artist. So, she railed against this idea. She said 'the fixed image terrifies me' because she felt it was if you had been psychologically frozen. Humans are endlessly evolving, and she wanted to reflect that in her work. But it was a very brave stance to take at the time because it was not the reigning fashion.

One of the other terms sometimes used to define Abstract Expressionism is 'Action Painting'. One of the core ideas is that the picture is the 'main event'. The canvas is an arena in which the artist acts. And I think we do see that within Krasner's work, so from the very beginning she refuses to ever do any preparatory studies -- so we have no works on paper in which she's sketching out a design for a large-scale abstract painting. When she's working, she confronts an empty canvas and she asks herself what she is to do with it. She's there, and she's present and she's live and she's trying to capture something of her experience of that time, whichever medium she's working with at that moment. And I think Krasner is an interesting example where she moved through these different cycles and at different moments, we see her playing with different aspects of these ideas. So we might think of Abstract Expressionist collage, or we might think of the more gestural painting, or we might think of the 'hard edge' painting. And Krasner's very funny -- she says we can talk *ad infinitum *about these very formal questions but eventually they get boring, because the real question is when the inner aspects and the outer aspects of a human interlock. That's what she's trying to achieve with a painting -- it's actually something quite transcendent. Regardless of her medium, or her formal techniques, which vary dramatically across her career, she's always trying to get at that.