Abstract Expressionism
...tled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red), 1949, large blocks of color have an almost iconic quality. The suggestion of a dark horizon in the center of the painting evokes universal feelings about distance and proximity, trouble and arrival, containment and freedom. Yet it is only through the side-by-side placement that this effect is created. The sheer beauty of some of these, and the haunting immateriality of their services, has caught the art public's imagination. Furthermore, abstract expressionism brought freshness to 20th-century painting with a new kind of appeal to the unconscious. Whereas the surrealists explored the unconscious for means of disrupting society’s cherished conventions, the abstract expressionist turned to the unconscious for symbols of universal meaning which could restore both art and society and per World War II. The 1950’s saw the advent of Pop Art in Europe with Richard Hamilton. Pop Art, or simply popular art was a reaction against abstract expressionism. Pop Art subtracted the the brush stroke element. American artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg brought Pop Art to America and made it their own. Andy Warhol, who had a flair for media events and self-promotion, really shook up the art world with his bright commercial colors. His pop art was produced in factories and in that regard removed the artist from the finished art in many of his pieces. The tenant of Pop Art was that art should be accessible universally not just by the uber-rich or elite. Conceptualism emerged in the 1960s and was defined and promoted by Sol LeWitt in 1967. Its central claim is that art is a ‘concept’, rather than with a a material object. There are strong precedents for conceptualism in the work of the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp and his Ready-Made pieces. Conceptualism as a movement is unique in that the artist deliberately blurs the distinction between language and art when they d...