by Christine Zibas
After World War II, there was a profound shift in the world of art. With personal safety in Europe so tenuous, there was a migration of prominent artists (such as Piet Mondrian and Max Ernst) to the United States, most notably to New York City. As a result, in the 1940s and 1950s, for the first time, American artists became important internationally, and their new vision became the movement that is now called Abstract Expressionism.
The term "Abstract Expressionism" was coined by Robert Coates in the March 1936 issue of "The New Yorker" magazine, and the movement's success was due in part to the support of critics like Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg (who also originally termed the style used by Jackson Pollock to be "Action Painting" and labeled this movement the "American Style"). Along with Jackson Pollock, the main artists who were considered to be the backbone of Abstract Expressionist genre were Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.
If one compares the work of these and other Abstract Expressionists, such as Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Phillip Guston, it's clear that the painters who came under this label shared a similarity of outlook, rather than style. This outlook was characterized by a spirit of revolt and a belief in the freedom of expression.
