Abstract Expressionism Timeline

In his most effective and accomplished paintings between 1941 and 1948, Arshile Gorky consistently used intense stained fields of color, often letting paint run and drip around his organic and biomorphic shapes and delicate lines, prefiguring later stain painting techniques.

Image source: Arshile Gorky

Robert Motherwell's long essay Totem Art (1943) had considerable influence on such artists as Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, helping shape the intellectual foundations of the emerging movement.

Image source: Robert Motherwell

Around 1944 Barnett Newman tried to explain America's newest art movement and included a list of "the men in the new movement", an early attempt to define the group of artists who would become known as abstract expressionists.

Image source: Barnett Newman

Like Picasso's reinventions via Cubism, and drawing on influences as disparate as Navajo sand paintings, surrealism, Jungian analysis, and Mexican mural art, Pollock redefined what it was to produce art during his classic drip painting period of 1947–1950.

Image source: Jackson Pollock

Woman V is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between 1950 and 1953 that depict a three-quarter-length female figure. He may have finished Woman I by the end of June or possibly November 1952, concluding the other pictures around the same time.

Image source: Woman

Willem de Kooning began the first of his famous Women paintings, Woman I, in June 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, when the painting was abandoned unfinished.

Image source: Woman I

During 1951 Pollock produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings, staining fluid oil paint into raw canvas, and in 1952 he produced stain paintings using color, extending his classic drip period innovations.

During the summer of 1952, spent at East Hampton, de Kooning further explored the theme of women through drawings and pastels, deepening the series that would become central to his reputation.

Having seen Pollock's 1951 paintings of thinned black oil paint stained into raw canvas, Helen Frankenthaler began to produce stain paintings in varied oil colors on raw canvas in 1952, pioneering a technique that shaped Color Field painting.

Image source: Helen Frankenthaler

As with Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, Franz Kline was labelled an "action painter" because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing on brushstrokes rather than imagery, as demonstrated by his painting Number 2 (1954).

Image source: Franz Kline

An example of Mark Rothko's combative stance toward critics is his letter of April 9, 1955, "Letter to Sidney Janis", in which he defended his artistic intentions — it is true that Rothko talks the fighter.

Image source: Mark Rothko

Hans Hofmann's paintings are a symphony of color, as seen in The Gate (1959–1960), one of his celebrated late works exemplifying his push-pull theory of color and composition.

Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923–2002), a member of the Montreal-based surrealist-inspired group Les Automatistes, helped introduce a related style of abstract impressionism to the Parisian art world from 1949.

Image source: Jean-Paul Riopelle

Frances Stonor Saunders' book The Cultural Cold War details how the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists as part of cultural imperialism via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the influence of abstract expressionism can be seen in diverse movements across the United States, from Color Field painting to Minimalism and beyond.

Michel Tapié's groundbreaking book Un Art Autre (1952) was enormously influential in promoting art informel and related abstraction, connecting European and American avant-garde movements.

In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both profoundly influenced by Helen Frankenthaler's stain paintings after visiting her studio in New York City, where they saw Mountains and Sea, a painting that was, in a sense, out of Pollock and out of Gorky.

Image source: Morris Louis

Clement Greenberg became the voice of Post-painterly abstraction by curating an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964, defining the movement that followed abstract expressionism.

Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1983) examined how New York displaced Paris as the center of the art world, with abstract expressionism at the heart of that story.

Image source: Voice of Fire

The scholarly volume Abstract Expressionism (New York & London: Thames & Hudson, 1990) contributed to the historical study and canonization of the movement.

Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1998) explored the culture of improvisation that underpinned postwar American art, including abstract expressionism.

Enamelist Paul Hultberg (1926–2019), an active contributor to the New York School, gained greater notoriety posthumously when historian and curator Glenn Adamson recognized his use of "chance operations", or "aleatory aesthetics".

Image source: Paul Hultberg