Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Abstract expressionism sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Abstract expressionism (1943 – 1965), it traces three movements that shaped it, all well-established links: Abstract art, Expressionism and Surrealism; it runs alongside three parallel movements, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: Art Informel, the Northwest School and Tachisme; it fans out to nine movements it went on to influence, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: Action painting, Color Field, Gutai group, Lyrical abstraction, Minimalism, Neo-Dada, Neo-expressionism, Nueva Figuración and Verdadism.
Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the center of this movement, included such artists as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov, and Lee Krasner among others. Read more ↗