Postwar Abstract Painting
Painting that left geometric discipline behind to foreground pigment as matter and the act of applying it, letting parallel moves on both sides of the Atlantic be read together.
Dictionary entry
- Color Field Painting late 1940s–1960s / Style
Large continuous fields, soaked edges and few forms build a space of color that fills the entire surface and asks to be looked at for a long time.
- Art Informel 1945–1960 / Style
A postwar European abstraction that refused both geometric composition and figuration, making the surface out of matter and the traces of the act itself. Thickly piled paint, scratches, stains and tears present a state before form. The source of all design that pushes the physicality of material to the front. Tachisme names the same paintings seen from the speed of the gesture, and Lyrical Abstraction names them seen from the lyric side.
- Tachisme 1945–1960 / Style
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.
- Neo-Expressionism 1978–1990 / Style
An international current in which large formats, violent brushwork and subjects from history and myth returned, in reaction against the asceticism of Minimal and Conceptual art. Its raw draughtsmanship and layers of grime feed directly into the temperature of 1980s record sleeves and magazine layouts.
- Nouveau Réalisme 1960–1970 / Style
A group that declared, in Paris in 1960, the direct appropriation of reality. Layers of torn posters, compressed car bodies and accumulated refuse make the city itself into the work without passing through depiction. The stance of selecting material rather than working it laid the ground for all later assemblage.
- Lyrical Abstraction 1947–1970s / Style
Abstraction that leans neither on geometric discipline nor on violent gesture, assembling a lyric out of flowing strokes and bleeding colour. The name was born in Paris and was later applied in America to thinly painted, stained canvases. A reference point whenever softness and lightness have to be designed.
- ZERO 1957–1966 / Style
An international postwar network that restarted from a 'zero point,' replacing gestural painting with monochrome repetition, light, fire, air, and movement so physical phenomena and the viewer's motion become the work.
- Dansaekhwa 1970s– / Style
Korean painting in which narrow fields of white, earth, and grey are joined to repeated acts of pressing, pulling, soaking, tearing, and marking; duration and resistance of the support create density beyond the monochrome look.