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 It is difficult to describe Abstract Expressionism because the artists in this movement painted with such variety. They shared common values more than common styles. Abstract Expressionism was an attitude and an outlook more than a style.
They valued individuality and spontaneous improvisation. They advocated freedom of expression in a spirit of revolt – revolt against conventional forms, and revolt against Western art. They created art with metaphysical significance as they explored the themes of creation, birth, life, and death.
There was no direct correlation between their paintings and external reality. They painted the expression of their own subjective minds. “Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. They work from a different source. They work from within.” (Jackson Pollock)
They drew their inspiration from nature, but it was a nature that was unrecognizable and stylized, a nature reduced to its basic geometrical forms.
The main representative of this genre was Jackson Pollock (1912-1956).
The American regional painter Thomas Hart Benton trained Pollock, and his early realistic paintings of American life reflect that training. Pollock later rejected Benton’s realism but retained the rhythmic quality of Benton’s work.
While undergoing psychoanalysis for alcoholism and depression, Pollock encountered the writings of the psychologist Carl Jung. Jung’s emphasis on the unconscious would become a large influence in his work. His “drip and splash” style (Time magazine once called him “Jack the Dripper”) was an attempt to remove all historic content from art and to free the unconscious impulses of the mind.
He painted with rapid and impulsive execution. His paintings had no visual center of attention. He worked on huge canvases set on the floor so that he could dance around them and fling his paint wherever he wanted. His “Action Paintings” were a deliberate attempt to evoke the rhythmic energy of nature.
Pollock’s personal life was short and tragic. Apart from brief and intermittent dry spells, he was drunk nearly every day of his working life. He died in an alcohol-related car crash on August 11, 1956. He was 44 years old.
Pollock's influence on modern art has been immense. Willem De Kooning once said about his work, “Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it. Picasso did it. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.” (Hans R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of Culture, p. 164) In 2006, producer David Geffen sold his painting “No, 5, 1948” to an undisclosed bidder for the astronomical price of $140,000,000, the most money ever paid for a painting in history.
In 1994, researchers at Harvard University published the results of their study concerning the connection between madness and creativity. They studied the paintings and psychiatric history of Pollock and 14 other Abstract Expressionists.
They diagnosed more than half with mood disorders such as depression, compounded by alcoholism. Six of the artists suffered from depression, two of them committed suicide, and two died in car accidents that may have been suicides.
Their conclusion was that mental illness spurred the creativity of the Abstract Expressionists, and at the same time destroyed their personal lives. (Report published in Collier's Year Book 1994)
Pollock once said, “Every good painter paints was he is.” That was certainly true with the Abstract Expressionists. The chaos on their canvas reflected the chaos in their life.
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