Mid Twentieth Century Art

Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art The end of WWII brought the world a great sense of relief, but it also brought new issues to deal with for the modern human being. Artists, more than any other humans affected by the new era, brought forth the struggles they were going through, putting them into their art, the best way for them to express themselves.

Since the early twentieth century, the world of art on the American on both sides of the Atlantic, was undergoing a tremendous process of change simply because the conventions of what the world knew as traditional art were no longer satisfying for the artists. The art in general, with a special accent on the visual arts, seemed to have reached a standstill, forcing the modern artists to try to find new ways of expression, using the same old medium: the canvas or the wall.

Some of the artists who will fuel the birth of abstract expressionism will come from Europe, some of them survivors of atrocities like Holocausts, like Arshile Gorky, some others will come from the most American landscapes possible, such as Wyoming, like Jackson Pollock. In 1947, both Rothko and Pollock embrace the abstract in their paintings. While both artists seem to have completely embraced the limitation of the flat canvass, both being abstract expressionists, they find themselves at two opposite ends of the spectrum.

Pollock is strongly relying on movement, while Rothko is entirely giving himself to two dimensionality and color. Although different in styles, their paintings communicate deep emotions, coordinated by their strive to find the essence of humanity, through artistic expression. The abstract expressionists were almost without fault, non-fitting individuals who were expressing through their art the state of mind of the modern being, in their own individual ways.

They experimented, they felt the need to invent, to innovate, to improvise and to foster new ways of expressions, new means, in order for them to go forward and to have something new and significant to say in art. They had to break with the conventions of the traditional art in order to do that. By the mid twentieth century, New York became the center of the art world, as it managed to gather some of the most significant names in modern art at the time.

The 9th Street Show from 1952 in New York, simply put New York on the map by gathering numerous names of the contemporary artists on both sides of the Atlantic, with a special accent on abstract expressionism. Thus, the paintings of artists like Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, started to speak to the rest of the world at a scale comparable to the scale of their art works. They certainly made an impact, although.