Abstract Expressionism

The first American movement to change the course of world art, in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. Its painters made huge canvases about the act of painting and the inner life. The 'action painters' attacked the canvas: Jackson Pollock dripped and poured paint onto canvas laid on the floor, Willem de Kooning slashed out his Women, Franz Kline swept black bars across white. Others, the colour-field wing, worked with large, calm areas of colour. Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and Hans Hofmann belong to the movement, which made New York the centre of the art world after the war.

How to tell it apart: large, abstract canvases with gestural, energetic brushwork, drips and splashes; Color Field painting, its quieter branch, uses flat, soaking expanses of colour instead.

203 works in the quiz. Play a round on Abstract Expressionism.

Artists

Jackson Pollock · Mark Rothko · Wassily Kandinsky · Isamu Noguchi · Willem de Kooning · Arshile Gorky · Louise Nevelson · Barnett Newman · Philip Guston · Franz Kline · Hans Hofmann · Richard Diebenkorn · Ad Reinhardt · Karel Appel · Adolph Gottlieb · Ossip Zadkine · Morris Louis · Minas Avetisyan · Malcolm Morley

Best-known works

“No. 5, 1948” — Jackson Pollock, 1948
“Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” — Jackson Pollock, 1950
“Woman III” — Willem de Kooning, 1953
“Interchange” — Willem de Kooning, 1955
“The Destroyed City” — Ossip Zadkine, 1953
“Woman I” — Willem de Kooning, 1950
“One: Number 31, 1950” — Jackson Pollock, 1950
“Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)” — Jackson Pollock, 1949
“Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II)” — Wassily Kandinsky, 1912
“Mural on Indian Red Ground” — Jackson Pollock, 1950
“Seated Woman on a Bench” — Willem de Kooning, 1972
“The Stations of the Cross - Lema Sabachthani” — Barnett Newman
“The Liver Is the Cock's Comb” — Arshile Gorky, 1944
“Murnau, Burggrabenstrasse 1, 1908” — Wassily Kandinsky, 1908
“Seated Woman” — Willem de Kooning, 1969
“Standing Figure” — Willem de Kooning, 1969
“Enigmatic Combat” — Arshile Gorky, 1936
“The Artist and His Mother” — Arshile Gorky, 1931
“Frog with Umbrella” — Karel Appel, 2001
“Night Wall I” — Louise Nevelson, 1972
“Spinning needles” — Minas Avetisyan, 1970
“Reclining Figure” — Willem de Kooning, 1969
“The fountain” — Karel Appel, 2001
“The flowers” — Karel Appel
“Armenia” — Minas Avetisyan, 1973
“Mural” — Jackson Pollock, 1943
“Blue poles (Number 11)” — Jackson Pollock, 1952
“Going West” — Jackson Pollock, 1935
“Number 3” — Jackson Pollock, 1949
“The Plough and the Song” — Arshile Gorky, 1946