By: Tori Veltri, Maddy Salo, & Emily
Lundh

Definition
• A movement embracing many individual styles
marked in common by freedom of technique,
a preference for dramatically large canvases,
and a desire to give spontaneous
expression to the unconscious.

History
• Started in New York in 1940’s
• New York School:
– Artists wanted to express feelings about World
War II
– Main Artists: Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock,
& Mark Rothko
– First U.S. movement to become famous

Influences
• Abstractionism & Expressionism
• Surrealism
• Great Depression
• World War Two
• Holocaust

Features
• Pieces of art are very large
• Applied paint expressively
• No realistic subject
• Expression of feelings and emotions
• Trying to depict the subconscious mind
• Same attitude about art but not technique or
style
• Expresses universal emotions

Types
Action Painting Colorfield Painting
• Not carefully applied • Carefully painted
• Applied paint roughly • Intense squares of color
• Personal expression • Few colors
• Paint is spontaneously • Large fields of flat, solid
dribbled, splashed or color spread across or
smeared onto the canvas stained into the canvas
• Areas of unbroken surface
and a flat picture plane

• January 28, 1912, born in Cody, Wyoming
• 1930, moved to New York
• 1935, he started work on the WPA Federal Art
Project as a painter
• 1937, began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism
• 1943, Pollock's first one-man art show in New
York
• 1945, Pollock married Lee Krasner
• 1947, Pollock developed the "dripping" process
• August 11, 1956, died in East Hampton, New York

Going West, 1934-1935

Blue (Moby Dick) 1943

Full Fathom Five 1947

Autumn Rhythm 1950

Number 14 1951

Convergence 1952

Willem de Kooning
• 1904- Born in Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Left home at 12 to work at a design &
decorating firm
• Depicted the human form using different
methods
• Work was constantly changing
• At the age of 20 he traveled to America as a
stowaway
• Influenced by Picasso, Cubism, Surrealism,
& Dadaism
• Gestural Abstraction
• Worked on Women Series for 30 years
• Died of Alzheimer's in 1997 at age 92

Pink Angels 1945

Woman 1 1950-52

…Whose Name was Writ in Water
1975

Mark Rothko
• Born in Russia, moved to New York
• Started as a surrealist
• Part of the New York School
• Style: Color field paintings
• Avoided subjects
• Transcendental Experience
• Mentally unstable

Slow Swirl at the End of the Sea (1943)

Orange and
Yellow (1956)

Red on Maroon
(1959)

Seagram Murals

Untitled (1969)

Rothko Chapel

Louise Nevelson
• Born in 1899 in the Ukraine and moved to
Maine in 1905 with her father
• Gave found objects a “spiritual life” inspired
by feminism
• Grouped wood together into monochromatic
cubist structures

Sky Cathedral (1982) by Louise Nevelson