The lessons of European modernism were also disseminated through teaching. Even prior to that date, its collection of Kandinskys had been publicly exhibited several times. Guggenheim Museum-the Museum of Non-Objective Painting-opened in 1939. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky, and others. Another forum for viewing the most advanced art was Albert Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, which was housed at New York University from 1927 to 1943. ![]() They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of Matisse, Léger, and Picasso, among others. The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe. The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path.īut it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. The Great Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither of which satisfied this group of artists’ desire to find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.Ībstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. ![]() Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. ![]() These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches-and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. Never a formal association, the artists known as “Abstract Expressionists” or “The New York School” did, however, share some common assumptions. A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art-and shifted the art world’s focus.
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