Abstract Expressionism vs Tachisme
抽象表現主義 / タシスム
Abstract Expressionism comes from Postwar American Art and Tachisme from Postwar Abstract Painting. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with different intent, which is the fastest way to tell them apart.
Abstract Expressionism
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On huge canvases, with bodily strokes, drips, stains and broad fields of color, what stays on the surface is the act of painting and strong inner feeling rather than a depicted subject.
Tachisme
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A European abstraction named for the tache, or stain, which gives the leading role to the chance of a brushmark and a drip. Planned composition is abandoned, and the speed at which paint lands and runs becomes the order of the surface. Within Art Informel this is the name that fixes on the swiftness of the gesture.
| Abstract Expressionism | Tachisme | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1940s–1950s | 1945–1960 |
| Family | Postwar American Art | Postwar Abstract Painting |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Vast canvases / Bodily brushwork / All-over composition / Drips and stains | Accumulations of stains and drips / Marks of rapid gesture / Arrangements without a centre / Contrast with reserves of white ground |
| Best used for | Key visuals for concerts and theatre where emotional intensity has to arrive first · Book covers where one huge abstract ground carries the title alone | Posters for improvised music or dance that put the speed of the performance on the page · Title pages and identity systems carrying speed through one authentic ink splash |
| Type | Keep words to a few and place them clear of the paint | One quiet grotesque, small and stable, set against the moving marks |
| Composition | Refuse a center and carry stroke density to every edge | Off-centre clusters of gesture surrounded by generous white; no grid, only momentum |
| Material | Thick paint and poured washes on a large support, drips left visible | Fluid ink and thinned paint that stains, drips and splashes on a white ground |
| Caution | Scattering energetic strokes as decoration skips each artist's method, the postwar politics and the tie between scale and body, and with neither density nor a record of decisions it reads as a dirty backdrop. | Avoid retouching or composing the splash after the fact—corrected gestures lose the recorded speed that is the style's entire content. |