Art history: Understanding abstract expressionism – Part 6

Maybe nothing would have happened if some new exhibitions in art had not open their doors between 1937 and 1942 in New York. For the first time in America European artists could be met and their works known. Many of these artists were refugees from the war, most of them part of the Surrealist movement. Young American artists at the time were already accustomed to some surrealist issues, as psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung and the unconscious, and they knew already the works of European artists like Miro’, but the fact that now, for the first time, European artists could be met and spoken to, helped to sweep away the myth around them, so that the inferiority complex of young American art could finally die. But the young New York artists also disliked some aspects of Surrealism, as for example the publicity mongering of Dali’ or the political attitudes of his colleagues; and the Americans didn’t want to mimic the Surrealists in their sado-masochistic nightmares.

Early Abstract Expressionists (this term stuck but the group didn’t feel as being part of Expressionism at all) wished to go back to pre-literate primitive’ tribal antiquity and were dedicated above all to transcend the mundane, the banal, and materiality, through the use of metaphor and symbol the unconscious became the field for fertile exploration in terms of imagery for many as Gorky, Pollock, Motherwell, Baziotes, early Rothko. Their images evoked a whole string of associations, although the viewer may or may not be fully conscious of this.

America of the 1940s was a place where artists faced redundancy while trying to bluff out a depressing sense of alienation; other contributions to the origins of Abstract Expressionism came from both psychological and geographical isolation for the individual as well as American art itself, like a provincial school.

After its (partial) development from Europe, American art soon became bigger, bolder, more direct and more powerful in speed and rawness. If Surrealism had to be left behind, belief in the efficacy of images remained, and the way to let them come through without any prefabrication was found through psychic automatism. The first to understand and try this power of chance associations was Arshile Gorky. In the short span between 1904 and his suicide in 1948, Gorky copied many styles, until he found his personal style in a glorious way: he could be defined as the bridge between Surrealism and America.

Early Abstract Expressionism included individualistic,