Abstract Expressionism and Its Critics

Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York in the years following the Second World War, as the city displaced Paris as the center of the international art world, partly because many European avant-garde artists had fled there during the war. Jackson Pollock became its most celebrated and controversial figure through the drip, or "action", paintings he began making around 1947 in his barn studio in Springs, on Long Island, laying raw, unstretched canvas on the floor and flinging, pouring, and dripping commercial house paint across it while moving around and even into the canvas itself. Pollock argued that this physical, improvisatory process, rather than any finished image, was the true subject of the work, a claim captured in the title of paintings such as One: Number 31, 1950, which record the trace of his own bodily movement across a field with no single focal point and no clear beginning or end.