Abstract Expressionism is a term none of the artists involved liked, but it covers a range of painters and sculptors working in North America in the decades immediately following World War II. What unites them is a commitment to individuality and personal expression.
They were never a group and their work is often wildly different. And yet their approach and context binds them loosely together. Artists including Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock created a large-scale, gestural, modern American Art that was informed by mural painters from Mexico, European surrealists and American landscape painting.
In these two lectures Ben Street will consider the emergence of these artists; their relationship to museum and gallery culture in New York; their complex relationship with American politics; and their afterlife in contemporary art, which continues to be felt to this day.
