Abstract Expressionism

Painters who had fled the war gathered in New York, and for the first time the center of gravity in art crossed the Atlantic. Starting in 1947, Pollock laid his canvases on the floor and began flinging paint across them. By 1949, Life magazine ran the headline “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The name for this movement was coined in 1946 by the critic Robert Coates — at the time, the work was being called the “spatter and dab school,” and Coates offered “abstract expressionism” as a replacement for that put-down. It's a rare case of a name invented to erase an insult rather than deliver one. The critics split into two camps: Rosenberg argued that the act of painting itself was the picture — “action painting” — while Greenberg said look at the color and the flat plane, nothing more. Standing in front of these enormous canvases feels less like looking at a painting and more like being submerged in one.