What Is Abstract Expressionism? History, Pollock, Rothko and Its Spanish Echo

Pollock letting paint drip onto a canvas laid flat on the floor, de Kooning clawing at his with furious brushstrokes, Rothko stacking vast, silent fields of colour: Abstract Expressionism is probably the movement that changed the very image of the painter's studio more than any other. Born in New York after the Second World War, it also has a far less familiar echo on this side of the Atlantic — reaching as far as Spain, where a group of Madrid painters proposed their own version as early as 1957. In this new Journal article, I trace the history of this founding movement, its two great branches, and what it owes to a Europe it's too often set against.

New York, 1943-1950: the birth of Abstract Expressionism

The term appears in New York's press as early as the 1940s, but it's only after the war that it comes to name a movement in its own right. Paris, wounded and occupied, then slowly rebuilding, briefly stops being the undisputed capital of modern art; New York, untouched by the fighting and buoyed by galleries such as Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, becomes the ground for a generation of painters wanting to break both with the European figurative tradition and with the cold geometry of their predecessors. Many of them — Pollock, Rothko, Gorky — were shaped by the automatism of the Surrealists exiled in New York during the war: letting the hand paint before the mind decides.

Action painting and colour field painting: two temperaments, one movement

Abstract Expressionism isn't a single style but two temperaments living under one name. On one side, the action painting of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline: the canvas laid on the floor, paint flung, poured or clawed on in brushstrokes, the whole body caught up in an almost choreographic gesture. On the other, the colour field painting of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman or Clyfford Still: vast fields of colour filling the entire visual field, with no visible gesture, aiming for an emotion that's contemplative rather than physical. Both branches share the same monumental scale and the same refusal of figuration — but one shouts while the other whispers.

The European echo: Art Informel and wounded matter

In Paris, during those same years, a generation of painters explored a parallel path under the name Art Informel — Jean Fautrier and his Otages built from thick, scraped paste, Wols and his nervous, spidery marks, Jean Dubuffet and his Hautes Pâtes, textured like a wall or a ploughed field. Like their American counterparts, they rejected planned composition in favour of raw matter and uncontrolled gesture — but their abstraction stayed haunted by the memory of a country disfigured by war, more tragic than New York's conquering lyricism. Tachisme and the lyrical abstraction of Georges Mathieu or Hans Hartung, which I cover in more depth in the article on geometric versus lyrical abstraction, belong to that same European family of gesture.

The Spanish echo: the El Paso group and Antoni Tàpies

Franco's Spain, culturally isolated, nonetheless had its own version of that same gesture. In 1957, in Madrid, a group of young painters founded El Paso: Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares, Rafael Canogar, Manuel Viola. Their dark, tormented painting sought, in matter and in black, an escape route that censorship forbade elsewhere. In Barcelona, Antoni Tàpies pushed the logic of matter even further, mixing sand, marble powder and glue into his paint to build cracked, almost mural-like surfaces that he scratched or incised like a wounded wall. This Spanish Informalism remains prominently held today in the collections of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid — a scene I've had the chance to encounter first-hand during my own exhibitions in the Spanish capital, far removed in spirit from my own geometry, yet just as inhabited by matter.

Five traits for recognising Abstract Expressionism

• —Scale — often monumental canvases, meant to envelop the eye rather than be viewed from a distance
• —All-over composition — no centre, no single focal point: the eye moves freely across the whole surface
• —Visible gesture — drips, scratches and splatters that keep the physical trace of the painter's movement
• —Matter — thick impasto or scraped surfaces that give the canvas an almost sculptural relief
• —Raw emotion — urgency, tension or gravity, rather than the order and calm of a composition planned in advance

I've never tried to erase gesture from my canvas — but I refuse to let it decide everything: the knife draws a limit exactly where Abstract Expressionism chooses to draw none.

My own painting, between geometric heritage and the pull of gesture

Trained in Buenos Aires and then São Paulo, I inherited a Latin American geometric abstraction that owes far more to Torres-García and the Concrete movement than to Pollock or Tàpies — a lineage I detail in the article on Latin American geometric abstraction. But I understand the pull of uncontrolled gesture perfectly well: my palette-knife work sometimes lets matter overflow from one colour field into the next, without ever giving up the line that structures the composition. That tension between construction and instinct runs through works such as Clivage or Mutation, which you can discover in the Full Collection, or come see in person at an upcoming exhibition in France, Spain or Andorra, announced on the News page.