American Art History

I believe that Abstract Expressionism became the dominant artistic form in the 1950 's precisely because of the difficulties coupled with the Cold War and the Depression . The difficulties of the era were a viable stimulator for art , as they provided the emotional intensity and the difficult themes necessary for the creation of real art . Moreover society as a whole reacting conservatively could only have served as an additional stimulus for the art to be fruitful . Art is always a manifestation of certain tendencies , and often it forecasts the future - and

the future would bear some of the greatest changes in American (and world ) history to come . Abstract expressionism , like its predecessors Bauhaus and Surrealism , showed this tension and anxiety , and make it art

It is interesting to note that Abstract Expressionism has much in common with the Russian artists of the beginning of the twentieth century - in fact , it was one of those who coined the term which later came to be referential for the 1950 's art . The atmosphere in the Soviet union was of a similar paranoid bent then , and ways this fear of the future and uncertainty , and an attempt to find new forms of art are strikingly similar to Abstract Expressionism , as well . Art is one of those forms which always shows what lurks below the surface of any stable system - and in both these cases it showed fear and irrationality , and also uncertainty and human vulnerability . Paintings with such titles as The Flesh Eaters ' or Symphony N .1 : The Transcendental ' showed that attention was driven away from the flesh which turned out to be so weak that its concepts did not hold even though society upheld them dutifully , but rather turned to pure form color and number , in an attempt to find what lay beyond the flesh . It would foreshadow a new era of discovery , a forage from the modern into the postmodern , an attempt to deconstruct reality - and to see whether there is anything to rebuild from afterwards

Abstract Expressionism is a frightening art , an art which takes the human apart - by psychoanalysis , by form , by substance . And as such I believe it shows society 's supressed attempt to find out what precisely went wrong and how it is to be fixed . Artists , as always , are at the frontier of human though about themselves in this case - and the art they made is as frightening as the circumstances under which they made it

Works cited

Paul , Stella "Abstract Expressionism . In Timeline of Art History . New York : The Metropolitan Museum of Art , 2000 . Retrieved from http /www .metmuseum .org /toah /hd /abex /hd_abex .htm (October 2004 ) on June 2 , 2007...