Postwar Painting and Abstraction

Jackson Pollock laid his canvases on the floor. Instead of standing at an easel, he moved around the surface, pouring paint from the can or trailing it from a brush or a stick, so that the finished picture recorded the movement of a body as much as a decision of the eye. The method made the act of painting part of the subject, and the action painters, as they came to be called, placed their inner impulses directly onto the canvas.

This section covers abstract painting from the late 1940s into the 1960s, with its centre of gravity in New York and important branches in Europe. It runs from the gestural canvases of the New York School to the flat colour of the following generation and the hard geometry of minimalism.

Two kinds of abstract expressionism

Tate divides the New York School into two camps. The action painters, led by Pollock and Willem de Kooning, worked with improvised, sweeping marks. The second group, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, built simple compositions from large areas of colour meant to hold the viewer in contemplation. Both drew on the surrealist belief that art should come from the unconscious, and on the automatism of Joan Miró. Newman put the ambition plainly in a 1948 essay: “Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.”

Colour as field

Around 1960 colour painting cooled down. Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam were among the painters who took it there. These painters dropped both the mythic content and the personal brushwork of the earlier generation. In 1964 the critic Clement Greenberg organised an exhibition of thirty-one such artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and called it Post-Painterly Abstraction, a name that stuck. The label colour field painters came later, as a chapter title in a history of abstract expressionism published in 1970. In Britain, Robyn Denny, John Hoyland and Richard Smith developed their own versions through the 1960s.

Minimalism and the end of gesture

Frank Stella’s Black Paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959, and they rejected the brushy, gestural painting of the artists just before them. Stella summed up the new attitude: “What you see is what you see.” Through the 1960s and 1970s Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Robert Morris pared art down to simple geometric forms and industrial materials. Their sources included the Russian avant-garde, newly accessible in English through Camilla Gray’s book of 1962, and Flavin began a series of homages to Vladimir Tatlin in 1964.

Europe after the war

Abstraction carried a particular charge in postwar Germany, where the Nazis had condemned modern art as degenerate. In 1955 the Kassel painter and professor Arnold Bode staged the first documenta in the partly restored Museum Fridericianum, presenting the classical modernism that had been banned and trying to bring Germany back into conversation with the rest of the world. It drew 130,000 visitors. A second edition followed in 1959, and the exhibition became a fixture; documenta itself now examines the Nazi past of some of its early organisers, including the art historian Werner Haftmann.

Looking at the work

Scale matters here more than in almost any other period. Many of these paintings were made to be seen at close range, filling the field of vision, and reproductions shrink them into objects they were never meant to be. The articles below look at individual painters and canvases, at the critics who argued over them, and at the museums that made room for pictures this large.