© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024. Image credit: Tate
A description generally applied to aspects of modern American painting in the late 1940s and early 1950s which were concerned both with the various forms of abstraction and with psychic self-expression. Abstract Expressionism was more of an attitude than a style, drew on many historical sources from Van Gogh to Matisse and Kandinsky, and embraced a wide variety of paintings ranging from the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock to the intensely coloured floating shapes of Mark Rothko.
Although the term had been known since the 1920s, when it was used to describe Kandinsky's abstract paintings, it was first employed to describe contemporary painting in 1946, by Robert Coates in the New Yorker magazine. Championed by the critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg (who in 1948 declared that the future of western art depended on this phase in American painting), Abstract Expressionism gained widespread acceptance in the 1950s, at first in America and then internationally (the first American movement to do so), the European variant being Art Informel, a term coined by Michel Tapié in 1952.
Text source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms (2nd Edition) by Michael Clarke
