broad movement in American painting that began in the late 1940s and became a dominant trend in Western painting during the 1950s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock (Pollock, Jackson), Willem de Kooning (de Kooning, Willem), Franz Kline (Kline, Franz), and Mark Rothko (Rothko, Mark). Others included Clyfford Still (Still, Clyfford), Philip Guston (Guston, Philip), Helen Frankenthaler (Frankenthaler, Helen), Barnett Newman (Newman, Barnett), Adolph Gottlieb (Gottlieb, Adolph), Robert Motherwell (Motherwell, Robert), Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt (Reinhardt, Ad), Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov (Tworkov, Jack). Most of these artists worked, lived, or exhibited in New York City.

Although it is the accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not an accurate description of the body of work created by these artists. Indeed, the movement comprised many different painterly styles varying in both technique and quality of expression. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings share several broad characteristics. They are basically abstract—i.e., they depict forms not drawn from the visible world. They emphasize free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exercise considerable freedom of technique and execution to attain this goal, with a particular emphasis laid on the exploitation of the variable physical character of paint to evoke expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They show similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of that paint in a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with a similar intent of expressing the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display the abandonment of conventionally structured composition built up out of discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. And finally, the paintings fill large canvases to give these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing power.

In spite of the diversity of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general approaches can be distinguished. One, Action painting (q.v.), is characterized by a loose, rapid, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes and in techniques partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced Action painting by dripping commercial paints on raw canvas to build up complex and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline used powerful, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas to create starkly monumental forms.

The middle ground within Abstract Expressionism is represented by several varied styles, ranging from the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic pictures of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

Abstract Expressionism had a great impact on both the American and European art scenes during the 1950s. Indeed, the movement marked the shift of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar decades. In the course of the 1950s, the movement's younger followers increasingly followed the lead of the colour-field painters and, by 1960, its participants had generally drifted away from the highly charged expressiveness of the Action painters.