The Most Famous Abstract Artists | BlogLet.com The Most Famous Abstract Artists Post 289 of 476 ‹‹ ›› August 6, 2013 Brady Foster Artists Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II American art movement developed during the 40s in New York. This movement was the first to achieve international influence and transform New York into the art center of the western world, a title previously held by Paris. This art form values the unknown over the known, the individual over society, expression over perfection, the inner over the outer and the veiled over the clear. These are 3 of the most famous abstract artists in the world: Paul Jackson Pollock Paul Jackson Pollock is considered one of the most famous abstract artists because of his unique drip painting, a style that he abruptly abandoned at the peak of his fame. The influential American painter was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, although he also enjoyed considerable notoriety. Pollock struggled with alcoholism for most of his career and life because of his volatile personality. He married Lee Krasner in 1945, also a famous abstract artist who became his muse and critic, greatly influencing his career.

Jackson Pollock’s most notable paintings were made between 1947 and 1950, during the drip period. After 1951 he mainly used darker colors, printing in black on unprimed canvases. Later he returned to color and moved to a more commercial gallery, because there was a great demand for his work. Due to the increased stress and pressure, his alcoholism aggravated. Pollock painted his last two artworks in 1955, Scent and Search. Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning was an American abstract expressionist artist born in Rotterdam. Despite his Dutch heritage, he is considered one of the most famous abstract artists in the U.S. Kooning painted in the post-World War II era in a style later called Action painting or abstract expressionism. His style was based on ambiguity and complex figures. In most of Kooning’s paintings background figures overlap other figures, which in turn are overlapped by dripping paint lines, thus creating the effect of multiple foregrounds. Kooning painted women regularly between 1947 and 1949. After this period, he explored this subject exclusively.

In 1964 the artist was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 1986 the National Medal of Arts. Kooning and Eduardo Chillida were presented with the Andrew W. Mellon Prize in 1986 at the Carnegie Institute. His first solo show took place in 1948 at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York. Many museum retrospectives followed, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Mark Rothko Along with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko is one of the most famous abstract artists in the postwar period. This American painter of Latvian Jewish descent rejected the label of an abstract expressionist, although he is generally identified as an abstract artist. Rothko explored subjects other than nature and urban scenes because he feared the modern painting has reached a conceptual blockage. He found it necessary to create gods, demigods, hybrids and monsters in the same way as the modern man found intermediaries in the Communist Party and Fascism, stating that without these mythical creatures art cannot enact a drama.

Rothko was also inspired by Nietzsche and Freud, believing that art can free unconscious energies that were previously liberated by mythological elements. Related Posts Jackson Pollock Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story Like The Art Story on Facebook Follow The Art Story on Google+ "It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement." Synopsis In its edition of August 8th, 1949, Life magazine ran a feature article about Jackson Pollock that bore this question in the headline: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Could a painter who flung paint at canvases with a stick, who poured and hurled it to create roiling vortexes of color and line, possibly be considered "great"? New York's critics certainly thought so, and Pollock's pre-eminence among the Abstract Expressionists has endured, cemented by the legend of his alcoholism and his early death. The famous 'drip paintings' that he began to produce in the late 1940s represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century.

At times they could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world. Key Ideas Pollock's tough and unsettled early life growing up in the American West shaped him into the bullish character he would become. Later, a series of influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space. In 1939, Pollock began visiting a Jungian analyst to treat his alcoholism, and his analyst encouraged him to create drawings. These would later feed his paintings, and they shaped Pollock's understanding of his pictures not only as outpourings of his own mind, but expressions that might stand for the terror of all modern humanity living in the shadow of nuclear war. Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.

Most Important Art Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950) While only one painting from Pollock's 1950 solo exhibition was actually sold, the show gained much attention. It was described by Art News as one of the three best exhibitions of the year, and Cecil Beaton staged a famous fashion shoot in the exhibition space, which subsequently appeared in Vogue. Autumn Rhythm was one of the major works which appeared in that show. As with many of Pollock's paintings, he began it with a linear framework of diluted black paint which in many areas soaked through the unprimed canvas. Over this he applied more skeins of paint in various colors - lines thick and thin, light and dark, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical. As the title suggests, the coloring, horizontal orientation, and sense of ground and space in Autumn Rhythm are strongly evocative of nature. The balance between control and chance that Pollock maintained throughout his working process produced compositions that can have as much calm tranquillity as some works by Rothko.

Oil on canvas - Metropolitan Museum of Art Like The Art Story on Facebook Biography Childhood Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, the fifth and youngest son of a family of Irish-Scottish extraction. Pollock was only ten months old when the family moved to San Diego. His father's work as a surveyor would force them to move repeatedly around the Southwest in subsequent years, until, when Pollock was aged nine, his father abandoned the family, only to return when Jackson himself had left home. The West of Pollock's childhood provided a tough upbringing, but he grew to love nature - animals and the expanse of the land - and while living in Phoenix in 1923 he discovered Native American art. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Early Training Pollock attended the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where he befriended Philip Guston, and where he was also introduced to theosophical ideas which prepared him for his later interests in Surrealism and psychoanalysis.

Two of Pollock's older brothers, Charles and Sanford, also pursued careers as artists, and it was their encouragement which lured him to New York in 1930, where he studied under Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. In New York Pollock was attracted to Old Masters and began to study mural painting. He posed for Benton's 1930-31 murals at the New School for Social Research, and he met the prominent Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. He later spent a summer observing Diego Rivera paint murals at the New Workers School, and in 1936 he joined the Experimental Workshop of another muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, where he learned to employ unorthodox painting techniques. Pollock's own canvas, Going West (1934-35), blends many of these influences and is typical of his style at this time. In 1937, he was assigned to the Easel Division of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project.

During much of the 1930s Pollock lived with his brothers in Greenwich Village, and was at times so poor that he had to work as a janitor and steal food to survive. In 1932, however, he was invited to participate in the 8th Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels and Drawings by American and French Artists at the Brooklyn Museum, his first exhibition. Mature Period In 1936, Pollock briefly met Lenore ("Lee") Krasner. In time, their relationship would bring some of the few spells of calm and happiness that Pollock ever knew. But the two did not meet again until 1941, after which they became romantically involved and married in 1945. Meanwhile, Pollock's alcoholism - which had been a problem since his adolescence - drove him into treatment as early as 1938, and by 1939 he was receiving Jungian psychoanalysis.

His analyst encouraged him to produce drawings to aid his recovery, and the methods and motifs in these drawings - albeit shaped by Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jose Clemente Orozco and the theories of John Graham - soon found their way into works such as Guardians of the Secret(1943). Despite his personal problems, Pollock remained bullishly confident in his art. Krasner was impressed when she saw his work in the early 1940s and introduced him to her teacher, Hans Hofmann. Hofmann was similarly enthusiastic, and the meeting blossomed into an enduring friendship between the two men. Hofmann is said to have remarked that Pollock needed to work more from nature, to which Pollock famously replied, "I don't paint nature, I am nature." The WPA came to an end in 1943 and Pollock was forced to find work on his own. Along with various odd-jobs he became a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum), and it was there that he met Peggy Guggenheim, who invited him to submit work to her new gallery, Art of This Century.

Eventually, Guggenheim put Pollock on a contract, and in 1943 she gave him his first solo exhibition, which was well received. The critic Clement Greenberg noted with approval that Pollock had absorbed and transcended Mexican mural painting, Picasso and Miró. The pictures still carried much figuration, although the references remained concealed - as Pollock said, "I choose to veil the imagery." At the same time, Peggy Guggenheim also commissioned a painting for the entry hall of her New York apartment. The resulting work was Mural (1943), which would prove important in Pollock's transition from a style shaped by murals, Native American art and European modernism towards his mature drip technique. And it was Guggenheim who again helped Pollock when he needed a down-payment to secure an old farmhouse in the town of The Springs on Long Island. He and Krasner bought the farmhouse in the fall of 1945 and married in October. Krasner hoped that distance from the struggles and temptations of the city would offer a great opportunity for both of them to pursue their painting in seclusion and peace.

Exactly how Pollock came upon his drip technique has been a matter of long and inconclusive scholarly argument, but his work was already taking steps towards it in the mid-1940s. He began to lose the symbolic imagery of his earlier pictures and looked for more abstract means of expression. His experience of painting Mural for Guggenheim's apartment was also important in spurring him on, and in 1945 he painted There Were Seven in Eight, a picture in which recognizable imagery was thoroughly suppressed and the surface was knitted together by a vivid tangle of lines. In the following years his style became more boldly abstract still, and he produced works like Shimmering Substance (1946). The following year he finally hit on the idea of flinging and pouring paint, and thus found the means to create the light, airy and apparently endless webs of color that he was reaching towards. Masterpieces such as Full Fathom Five (1947) were the result. Pollock had carried out another stylistic somersault and arrived at a method that synthesized Impressionism, Surrealism and Cubism.

Shimmering Substance led on to works like Number 1A (1948), a larger canvas than Pollock was familiar with, and dense with a dazzling web of color. He found he was best able to approach works such as this by positioning the canvas flat on the floor, moving around it and applying the paint from all sides. By dipping a small stick, house brush or trowel into the paint and then rapidly moving his wrist, arm and body, he allowed it to drip and fall in weaving rhythms over the surface. The technique - the epitome of what critic Harold Rosenberg would call "action painting" - rarely permitted the brush to directly touch the canvas. "On the floor I am more at ease," he said. "I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting." Pollock's work thus became as much about process as they were about product. They became a record of the performance of painting - his play in and around the canvas, where he could enter them as a participant and hover above them as their creator. "There is no accident," Pollock once said, "just as there is no beginning or end..

Sometimes I lose a painting, but I have no fear of changes, of destroying the image, because a painting has a life of its own." Critics were quick to recognize the power of Pollock mature work. Greenberg, who would be his staunchest and most powerful supporter, wrote at the time, "[His] superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to create genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control." But when Pollock's pictures reached a wider public, through coverage in magazines such as Vogue and Life, the response was a mixture of shock and incredulity. Nor was he widely collected at first, having only a small circle of supporters. Commercial success would soon come, but even at its height - after Art of This Century Gallery had closed and gallery owner Betty Parsons had taken over Pollock's contract - the painter was still being treated for alcoholism. Pollock supposedly stayed dry from mid-1948 to late 1950, and during these years he lived primarily in Long Island, only occasionally coming into the city.

In 1950, he had a successful solo exhibition, and, along with Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, was selected by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., for the Venice Biennale. But a year later he was drinking again. Late Period and Death Pollock's radical abstraction seemed to herald an incredible new freedom for painting, yet semblances of recognizable imagery continued to hover in the background of his pictures. The vast expanse of Blue Poles (1952) is knitted together with the aid of diagonal lines. And One: Number 31 (1950) retains a strong sense of rhythmically dancing figures, amidst its remarkable diversity of effects. Pollock might have abandoned the realism of his youth, but he still managed to make his paintings eloquently metaphorical. Like many of his canvases from this time, One evokes a mood of grandeur which ties it to the tradition of sublime landscape which stretches back into the eighteenth century. It also glistens as if it were dappled with light in the manner of Monet's canvases, and many critics have speculated on whether Pollock was influenced by the French Impressionist.

Pollock never really lost his interest in figurative imagery - as he once put it, "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge." As early as the late 1940s, figuration showed signs of resurfacing in his work. By 1950, whilst his drinking increased, he returned to drawing, resurrecting some of his old motifs, and producing a series of mainly black and white poured paintings. Some, like Yellow Islands (1952), incorporate touches of color and are highly abstract; some, like Echo (Number 25, 1951), are calligraphic in style and only residually figurative; others bear clear images of heads. They were badly received when Pollock first exhibited them, but he continued to work on them right through 1953, his last productive year of work. His personal troubles only increased in his later years. He left Betty Parsons Gallery, and, his reputation preceding him, he struggled to find another gallery. He painted little in 1954, claiming that he had nothing left to say.

In the summer of 1956, Krasner took a trip to Europe to get some distance from Pollock, and soon after the painter began a relationship with 25 year old artist Ruth Kligman, who he had met at the Cedar Bar. Then, on the night of August 11, 1956, while Pollock was drunk and out driving with Kligman and her friend, Edith Metzger, he lost control of the car, killing himself and Metzger, and seriously injuring Kligman. Legacy Pollock's immediate legacy was certainly felt most by other painters. His work brought together elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism, and transcended them all. Beside that achievement even greats such as de Kooning, who remained closer to Cubism, and hung on to figurative imagery, seemed to fall short. And the best among subsequent generations of painters would all have to take on his achievement, just as Pollock himself had wrestled with Picasso.

And as early as 1958, when pioneering performance artist Allan Kaprow explicitly addressed the question of his legacy in an article for Art News, some were beginning to wonder if Pollock might even have opened up possibilities outside of the realm of painting. To borrow critic Harold Rosenberg's words, Pollock had re-imagined the canvas not as "a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object.. [but as] an arena in which to act." And it was a short step from this realization to interpreting Pollock's balletic moves around the canvas as a species of performance art. Since then, Pollock's reputation has only increased. The subject of many biographies, a movie biopic, and major retrospectives, he has become not only one of the most famous symbols of the alienated modern artist, but also an embodiment for critics and historians of American modernism in its finest hour.

Influences and Connections Abstract Expressionism | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Works of Art (17) Essay 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. Never a formal association, the artists known as “Abstract Expressionists” or “The New York School” did, however, share some common assumptions.

Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), William Baziotes (1912–1963), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), and Clyfford Still (1904–1980) advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content. 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. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process.

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. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode. Context Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. 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. 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. But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe.

The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. 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. 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. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky, and others. The forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—opened in 1939. Even prior to that date, its collection of Kandinskys had been publicly exhibited several times. The lessons of European modernism were also disseminated through teaching.

The German expatriate Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) became the most influential teacher of modern art in the United States, and his impact reached both artists and critics. The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man’s dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Direct contact with European artists increased as a result of World War II, which caused so many—including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Breton, Mondrian, and Léger—to seek refuge in the U.S. The Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on tapping the unconscious. One Surrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein. Early Work Early on, the Abstract Expressionists, in seeking a timeless and powerful subject matter, turned to primitive myth and archaic art for inspiration. Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Newman, and Baziotes all looked to ancient or primitive cultures for expression.

Their early works feature pictographic and biomorphic elements transformed into personal code. Jungian psychology was compelling too, in its assertion of the collective unconscious. Directness of expression was paramount, best achieved through lack of premeditation. In a famous letter to the New York Times (June 1943), Gottlieb and Rothko, with the assistance of Newman, wrote: “To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical.” Mature Abstract Expressionism: Gesture In 1947, Pollock developed a radical new technique, pouring and dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (instead of traditional methods of painting in which pigment is applied by brush to primed, stretched canvas positioned on an easel). The paintings were entirely nonobjective. In their subject matter (or seeming lack of one), scale (huge), and technique (no brush, no stretcher bars, no easel), the works were shocking to many viewers.

De Kooning, too, was developing his own version of a highly charged, gestural style, alternating between abstract work and powerful iconic figurative images. Other colleagues, including Krasner and Kline, were equally engaged in creating an art of dynamic gesture in which every inch of a picture is fully charged. For Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lay in its directness and immediacy of expression. A painting is meant to be a revelation of the artist’s authentic identity. The gesture, the artist’s “signature,” is evidence of the actual process of the work’s creation. It is in reference to this aspect of the work that critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” in 1952: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Mature Abstract Expressionism: Color Field Another path lay in the expressive potential of color.

Rothko, Newman, and Still, for instance, created art based on simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields. The impulse was, in general, reflective and cerebral, with pictorial means simplified in order to create a kind of elemental impact. Rothko and Newman, among others, spoke of a goal to achieve the “sublime” rather than the “beautiful,” harkening back to Edmund Burke in a drive for the grand, heroic vision in opposition to a calming or comforting effect. Newman described his reductivism as one means of “… freeing ourselves of the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend … freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting.” For Rothko, his glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent color should provoke in viewers a quasi-religious experience, even eliciting tears. As with Pollock and the others, scale contributed to the meaning. For the time, the works were vast in scale. And they were meant to be seen in relatively close environments, so that the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work.

Rothko said, “I paint big to be intimate.” The notion is toward the personal (authentic expression of the individual) rather than the grandiose. The Aftermath The first generation of Abstract Expressionism flourished between 1943 and the mid-’50s. The movement effectively shifted the art world’s focus from Europe (specifically Paris) to New York in the postwar years. The paintings were seen widely in traveling exhibitions and through publications. In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, new generations of artists—both American and European—were profoundly marked by the breakthroughs made by the first generation, and went on to create their own important expressions based on, but not imitative of, those who forged the way. Stella Paul Department of Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 2004 Citation Paul, Stella. “Abstract Expressionism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004) Further Reading Messinger, Lisa Mintz Abstract Expressionism: Works on Paper. Selections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992.

See on MetPublications Thaw, Eugene Victor "The Abstract Expressionist." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 44, no. 3 (Winter, 1986–87). See on MetPublications Tinterow, Gary, Lisa Mintz Messinger, and Nan Rosenthal, eds. Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007. See on MetPublications Additional Essays by Stella Paul Jackson Pollock's Unique Style His Unique Style Action painting is a form of abstract expressionism. Jackson Pollock is the most celebrated artist of this form. What makes his style so unique is that he placed a large canvas on the floor instead of using the traditional easel. He painted with forceful, rapid, impulsive brush strokes or by splashing the paint directly onto the canvas. He also used sticks, trowels, paint cans with holes in the bottom, and knives to apply the paint. Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock from the movie "Pollack".

His method of painting came from his interest in primitive cultures and he was especially fascinated with Native American Navajo sand painters and their method of working. Their works were created on the ground with sand of various colors let loose from the hand. He described his abstraction as an attempt to evoke the rhythmic energy of nature. Other early influences on Pollock include Picasso, Miró, and the Surrealists, as well as Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siquieros and José Clemente Orozco. Pollock first encountered the use of enamel paint in 1936 from an experimental workshop in New York by Siquieros. He was encouraged to try using the unorthodox techniques that have made him famous, by flinging the paint and pouring it to gain spontaneous effects. Jackson Pollock - Key Often, he would use numbers as titles for his paintings. His technique was innovative, approaching the art from every possible angle. On some of his work, you can even see footprints, where he literally stepped into the painting. Rather than standing back from the canvas and contemplating it from a distance, he immersed himself in the act. By creating these action paintings, he felt he was actually a part of the painting.

He cared more about expressing his emotions and feelings rather than making a picture look real. But not all abstract expressionist painters were action painters. Pollock’s style and work was heavily praised and criticized. Some simply dismissed him and his work as meaningless and chaotic, and others saw them as organized, fascinating, and psychologically compelling. One of Pollock’s most ardent supporters, Clement Greenberg, said he was “the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who shows promise to be a major one.” Just like Pollock was influenced by others, he himself has influenced artists. His paint-pouring technique was adapted by color-field painters Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Frank Stella and Robert Morris made allover composition a hallmark of the minimal art movement. Performance artist Allan Kaprow and sculptors Richard Serra and Eva Hesse retained Pollock’s emphasis on the process of creation and pushed this emphasis even further.

Alexander Calder Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story Web Services & Hosting by The Computer Studio | Designed by DesArtLab Joan Miró Joan Miró Active in Paris from the 1920s onward, and influenced by Surrealism, Miró developed a style of biomorphic abstraction which blended abstract figurative motifs, large fields of color, and primitivist symbols. This style would be an important inspiration for many Abstract Expressionists. Piet Mondrian Piet Mondrian Piet Mondrian, a founding member of the De Stijl movement, was a modern Dutch artist who used grids, perpendicular lines, and the three primary colors in what he deemed Neo-plasticism. Marcel Duchamp Marcel Duchamp The French artist Marcel Duchamp was an instrumental figure in the avant-garde art worlds of Paris and New York. Moving through Dada, Surrealism, readymades, sculpture, and installation, his work involves conceptual play and an implicit attack on bourgeois art sensibilities. Hans Arp Hans Arp Hans Arp (also known as Jean Arp) was a German-French artist who incorporated chance, randomness, and organic forms into his sculptures, paintings, and collages.

He was involved with Zurich Dada, Surrealism, and the Abstraction-Creation movement. Museum of Modern Art Museum of Modern Art The Museum has become the home for some of the greatest works of avant-garde painting, sculpture, film and multi-media art in the world. While MoMA remains true to its roots as a place where new styles of art can circulate, its permanent collection is widely considered the most impressive and diverse assortment of Modern art to ever exist, ranging from late-nineteenth-century van Goghs, Monets and Gauguins to works produced in the present day. Claes Oldenburg Claes Oldenburg The Swedish-American artist and architect Claes Oldenburg, an early figure in New York happenings and Pop art, is best known for his floppy sculptures and larger-than-life public works of consumer goods, musical instruments, and everyday objects. Carolee Schneemann Carolee Schneemann Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relationship to social bodies.

Schneemann's works have been associated with a variety of art classifications including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, the Beat Generation, and happenings. Abstract Expressionism Abstract Expressionism A tendency among New York painters of the late 1940s and '50s, all of whom were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal themes. The movement embraced the gestural abstraction of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and the color field painting of Mark Rothko and others. It blended elements of Surrealism and abstract art in an effort to create a new style fitted to the postwar mood of anxiety and trauma. Franz Kline Franz Kline Franz Kline was an American abstract painter and one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. His signature black-and-white abstractions were inspired by Japanese calligraphy, and inspired a later generation of artists who created Minimalism. Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning, a Dutch immigrant to New York, was one of the foremost Abstract Expressionist painters. His abstract compositions drew on Surrealist and figurative traditions, and typified the expressionistic 'gestural' style of the New York School.

Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock was the most well-known Abstract Expressionist and the key example of Action Painting. His work ranges from Jungian scenes of primitive rites to the purely abstract "drip paintings" of his later career. John Cage John Cage John Cage was an American composer and conceptual artist who incorporated chance, silence, and environmental effects into his performances. An important art theorist, he influenced choreographers, musicians, and the Fluxus artists of the 1970s. Merce Cunningham Merce Cunningham Merce Cunningham was an American choreographer and dance instructor. He taught at Black Mountain College for several years, playing an important role in the school's interdisciplinary approach to art instruction. He founded the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York, and is considered one of the founders of modern dance. Surrealism Surrealism Perhaps the most influential avant-garde movement of the century, Surrealism was founded in Paris in 1924 by a small group of writers and artists who sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Much influenced by Freud, they believed that the conscious mind repressed the power of the imagination.

Influenced also by Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Kinetic Art Kinetic Art Kinetic art - art which depends on movement for its effects - has its origins in the Dada and Constructivist movements that emerged in the 1910s, but it flourished into a lively international avant-garde in the mid-1950s. Its adherents attempted to create new and more interactive relationships with the viewer, and new visual experiences, and its products often rejected the traditional, hand-crafted, static art object. Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso Picasso dominated European painting in the first half of the last century, and remains perhaps the century's most important, prolifically inventive, and versatile artist. Alongside Georges Braque, he pioneered Cubism. He also made significant contributions to Surrealist painting and media such as collage, welded sculpture, and ceramics. Fernand Léger Fernand Léger Influenced by Cubism and Futurism, the French painter Fernand Léger developed a unique style of Cubism using cylindrical and other geometric forms with mechanically smooth edges.

Often colorful and punctuated by patterns, his paintings range from still lifes and figures to abstract compositions. Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray was an American artist in Paris whose photograms, objects, drawings, and other works played an important role in Dada, Surrealism, modern photography, and avant-garde art at large. Isamu Noguchi Isamu Noguchi Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese-American modern artist. best known for his organic, biomorphic sculpture works, Noguchi was also a furniture designer and landscape artist. James Johnson Sweeney James Johnson Sweeney James Johnson Sweeney was an American curator, art collector, critic, and the second director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, from 1952 to 1960. Cubism Cubism Cubism was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907-1911, and it continued to be highly influential long after its decline. This classic phase has two stages: 'Analytic', in which forms seem to be 'analyzed' and fragmented; and 'Synthetic', in which pre-existing materials such as newspaper and wood veneer are collaged to the surface of the canvas.

Constructivism Constructivism Russian Constructivism emerged with the Revolution of 1917 and sought a new approach to making objects, one which abolished the traditional concern with composition and replaced it with 'construction,' which called for a new attention to the technical character of materials. It was hoped that these inquiries would yield ideas for mass production. The movement was an important influence on geometric abstraction. Futurism Futurism Futurism was the most influential Italian avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. Dedicated to the modern age, it celebrated speed, movement, machinery and violence. At first influenced by Neo-Impressionism, and later by Cubism, some of its members were also drawn to mass culture and nontraditional forms of art. Neo-Plasticism Neo-Plasticism Neo-Plasticism was the guiding philosophy behind the art of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and many of his peers in the De Stijl circle. Articulated by Mondrian in 1917-18, the approach stipulates the strict use of only horizontal and vertical lines; the primary colors red, yellow, and blue; and white, gray, and black.

George Rickey George Rickey George Rickey was an American kinetic sculptor. He designed sculptures whose metal parts moved in response to the slightest air currents. These parts were often very large, sometimes weighing tons. His work combines his love of engineering and mechanics, David Smith's graceful, yet solid, cubic forms, and the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Mark di Suvero Mark di Suvero Mark di Suvero is an American sculptor, best known for his large-scale non-objective works that have been tied to Constructivism, Conceptualism and Abstract Expressionism. Using materials such as railroad ties, steel and scrap metal, many of di Suvero's works contain moving parts, rendering them kinetic and thus altering one's experience of the work whilst viewing it. Ellsworth Kelly Ellsworth Kelly Ellsworth Kelly is an American Color Field and Hard edge painter. Kelly got his start in the late 1950s with showings at the Betty Parsons Gallery and the Whitney Museum. His work often consists of shaped canvases, simple geometric shapes, and large panels of uniform color.

Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia O'Keeffe was an American painter best known for her depictions of flowers, animal skulls, landscapes, and still lifes. Married to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, she was an important member of the "Stieglitz circle" and early American modernism. Jules Pascin Jules Pascin Jules Mordecai Pincas (aka Pascin, aka "Prince of Montparnasse") was a Bulgarian-born artist. Not associated with any particular twentieth-century movement, Pascin instead spent his life traveling throughout Europe and the U.S., experimenting with watercolor, drawing, and painting, typically using friends and family members as his subjects. Plagued with depression and alcoholism most of his life, Pascin committed suicide at age 45. Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre was a twentieth-century French philosopher, public intellectual, playwright, activist, literary critic and novelist. His name has become synonymous with Existentialism, the modern philosophy he popularized throughout his career.

Sartre's writings, while vast, are characterized by his intense focus on matters dealing with human behavior, the Ego and "the Other." In one of his most celebrated works, the play No Exit, one of Sartre's characters boasts the famous line, "Hell is other people." Pop Art Pop Art British artists of the 1950s were the first to make popular culture the dominant subject of their art, and this idea became an international phenomenon in the 1960s. But the Pop art movement is most associated with New York, and artists such as Andy Warhol, who broke with the private concerns of the Abstract Expressionists, and turned to themes which touched on public life and mass society. Artist - Biography.com Crime & Scandal Famous Artists Browse our collection of history's most famous artists, whose striking, pioneering artwork has depicted progressive interpretations as well as personal and historic events. Diego Rivera - Mini Biography (TV-14; 4:01) A short biography of Diego Rivera whose view that art should belong to everyone profoundly impacted the international art scene and led to his reintroduction of Fresco paintings in the 1930s.

Browse our collection of history's most famous artists, whose striking, pioneering artwork has depicted progressive interpretations as well as personal and historic events. Explore full biographies, and view photos and videos, of notable artists such as Jeff Koons, Romare Bearden, Jackson Pollack, Andy Warhol, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and more, only at Biography.com. People In This Group Artist Artist, Civil Rights Activist, Sculptor, Educator (1892–1962) What Makes a Jackson Pollock Painting Worth Millions? | The Huffington Post What Makes a Jackson Pollock Painting Worth Millions? 02/02/2014 03:47 pm ET | Updated Aug 21, 2014 170 John Seed Professor of Art and Art History, Mt. San Jacinto College In Pollock We Trust: Digital collage by Photofunia.com On November 12th of last year, Jackson Pollock's Number 16 sold for $32,645,000.00 at Christie's, New York .

The 30¾ by 22¼ inch painting has a surface area of 684.1875 square inches, which means that it sold for $47,713.52 per square inch. To put this in context, the Median U.S. Household Income for 2012 was $51,017.00. Just how did this Pollock painting -- a rectangle of paper covered with skeins of enamel paint -- come to be worth such a mind-boggling sum? It is a fantastic and vexing question isn't it? I think there is a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is that the figure of Jackson Pollock sits at the apex of a vast cultural construction: the currently accepted history of American art and culture. To explain how he got there, and how his work became a form of currency, requires a long answer. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Number 16, 1949 Oil and enamel on paper mounted on masonite, 30¾ x 22¼ in.

© 2001 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Jackson Pollock, who was born in 1912, perfectly embodies a cultural myth that has fascinated and obsessed Americans -- and those who have admired and/or envied American culture -- since World War 2: the myth of the heroic individual creator. Over time, Pollock's legendary status has been woven very completely into the fabric of a media society that has built art and culture into a very lucrative business. Pollock is an artist who is seen as the prime mover and innovator behind a new American style of art (Abstract Expressionism) that blossomed in this county in the aftermath of our nation's defeat of the Axis powers. America's triumph in the war, infinitely aided by our having developed nuclear weapons first, validated our obsession with progress and paved the way for an era of American cultural hegemony that has lingered strikingly. Interestingly, if the rise of Fascism hadn't driven a generation of intellectuals to emigrate to the U.S. the nuclear bomb and Abstract Expressionism would have likely both been invented in Europe.

If the idea that Europeans would have invented Abstract Expressionism seems improbable to you, take a look at Joan Miro's 1925 painting "The Birth of the World," which features a background of flung and poured paint that the artist himself characterized as "free and unconscious." This work was painted eleven years before the American critic Harold Rosenberg published an article in the New Yorker describing the emergence of what he called "Action Painting." Jackson Pollock led the American avant-garde -- originally a military term -- in its defeat and supersession of European culture. As we now know, Abstract Expressionism even had some CIA help in terms of becoming the representative style of American individualism and in turn confirming American exceptionalism. A new generation of critics, especially Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, made striking arguments for Pollock that helped him earn a lofty position in postwar America's rapidly evolving cultural Pantheon. Before the war America's cultural superstructure already had been developing rapidly. The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929: the same year that seventeen year old Jackson Pollock moved to New York to study art.

The growth of Pollock's career and the growth of the market for his work has coincided with the ascent of New York's status as America's -- and arguably the world's -- capital city of art and culture. According to this informative chart -- A History of New York's Gallery Districts -- there were 140 art galleries in New York when Pollock arrived. There are now about 1500. New York's art museums welcomed some sixteen million visitors in 2012. Arts in the broader sense -- Visual Art, Theater, Dance, etc -- are a huge economic force: a New York state survey of 2010 identified 53,085 arts-related businesses employing 335,683 people. Getting back to Pollock, a striking aspect of his work is that it is abstract. To put it another way, it requires anyone who accepts and or "likes" it as art to accept what was once a radical premise: that ideas are more valuable than skill. In the American model, progress starts with ideas and if you have a great one you are going to own a factory (or today an internet startup) not work in one.

The Philistine modern art haters of the fifties who would look at a Pollock in a magazine and say "My kid could do that" missed the point that Pollock was a "genius" who had changed how things were done because he had a new idea of how to do things: he replaced the brushstroke with the drip. Ideas begin in the mind as abstractions, and if you don't "get" a Pollock there remains a possible taint: if you need or like images or realism maybe you have an excessively literal mind. Pollock's career unfolded in an era when the development of mass media accelerated and multiplied the dissemination of new ideas and images in art. Pollock's career was certainly aided by the rise of mass media: a tremendous impact was made by the spread Life Magazine did on him in 1949, which posed the question: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States? In other words, he got in early on a trend that was just emerging.

If you are a visual artist living and working now you can't help but be aware of the fact that if you come up with a great idea in the form of an image it will be infinitely multiplied by a tsunami of jpegs that will spread your fame and increase your reputation across the globe. Try googling "Jackson Pollock" and you will get over 18 million search results. Jackson Pollock, who has been the subject of a feature motion-picture, a Pulitzer Prize winning biography and innumerable magazine articles and museum exhibitions has had his myth multiplied by a media society, and it didn't hurt that he died young in a spectacular car crash. Pollock's secure place as an embodiment of Americanism -- and as an internationally famous artist ---has translated into extraordinary cash values for his art. The price record is reportedly held by his No. 5 of 1948 which is believed to have sold for $140 million in 2006. Disputes over the authenticity of several purported Pollock works have made for some very entertaining news stories in the past decade. Recently, the authenticity of what some believe is Pollock's final painting has come to hinge on forensic analysis of a polar bear hair found embedded in the paint.

It is an accepted fact now that works of art can serve as financial instruments just like stocks, bonds or precious metals. If you want to check the value of Jackson Pollock as a "stock" you can use the Mei Moses® Fine Art Index to get an objective handle on the market. Art databases including those at Artnet.com and AskArt.com have made access to data about the prices of art at auction instantly available to anyone interested in investing works of art. By the way, we still refer to people that purchase multi-million dollar works of art as "collectors" but is there anyone with that kind of money who shouldn't be called an investor? One way to look at the prices for Pollock's work is to call it a great American success story. Can't we just sit back and beam with pride over the story of a troubled young man whose artistic legacy is valued by museums, auction houses and banking institutions? Another way to look at the situation would be to speculate that Pollock's prices are the result of a cultural asset bubble. What would happen, for example, if art historians came to a new conclusion and decided that Pollock was actually a rather minor artist after all?

Books would need to be re-written, curricula redesigned, and museums might put his works into storage. Pollock's Number 16 is an abstraction backed by an abstraction: the construct of America's cultural and artistic history. Like a one hundred dollar bill it is ultimately just a piece of paper that we have learned to trust as valuable. It is worth many millions of dollars only because an entire cultural system has been built on the assumption of its value. It seems like an unintended consequence, but the generations of predominantly left-leaning critics, curators, and academics who carefully constructed the story of American modernism ultimately built up a new asset class for super-wealthy investors. It strikes me as ironic that an artist we value for his rebelliousness and innovation has now become a figure that is somehow beyond question. Could you get a job as a Museum Director in the United States if you told those interviewing you that you didn't care for Pollock? I doubt it. The process of turning Pollock into an icon and a commodity has gone so far that it is nearly impossible to turn back. Perhaps for that very reason, Pollock paintings continue to look good to investors. After all: Pollock is too big to fail.

Note: for another very illuminating take on some of the forces at work in the Art Market, have a look at the video below, created by Tymek Borowski and Pawet Sysiak. Follow John Seed on Twitter: More:

Question: Which U.S. artist was famous for his unique drip painting?
Answer: JACKSON Pollack