Modernism

Modernism started in the 1850s and this was a time to rebel against realism. The rules to painting, photographs, you could get away with being figurative and abstract. Jackson Pollock became a worldwide symbol of the new American painting after World War II. The paintings done by Pollock in the mid-1940s were coarse, heavy, and filled with a nervous brutal energy all their own. By 1947, the artist began to experiment with all-over painting, a network of lines, splatters and paint drips from which created the famous poured paintings of the next few years. These paintings, generally executed on a large canvas laid out on the floor, are the works most popularly associated with so-called Action Painting. The furious and seemingly haphazard scattering of the paint was not a completely uncontrolled, intuitive act. In the paintings of Pollock and many of the other Abstract Expressionists, the element of instinct, or the accidental, plays a large and deliberate part. Honouring the spontaneous aspect of art was one of the principal contributions of Abstract Expressionism. Pollock's drip paintings contributed certain elements that changed the course of modern painting. Pollock's paintings introduced the concept that the painting is an environment, surrounding the viewer, and not separated from him. The feeling of participating in the painting is heightened by the ambiguity of the picture space. The moving lines and colours surge back and forth, all within a limited depth.