Abstract Expressionism Paintings

Featured Abstract Expressionism Fine Artists

Jackson Pollock was born in 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, and died in 1956. Raised in Arizona and California, he moved to New York in 1930, where he studied art under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Student League. From 1935 through 1942, he worked as an artist for the WPA. He had his first one-man show, in New York, in 1943. He began painting in the style for which he is best known, Action Painting (or "drip painting") in 1947. [More...]

Mark Rothko was born in 1903 to a Jewish family in Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, and died in 1970. He and his family emigrated to Portland, Oregon, in 1913. After graduating from Lincoln High School in Portland, he attended Yale University, but dropped out after his second year. He didn't seriously start studying art until 1924, when he started studying under Arshile Gorky and Max Weber at the Art Students League and the New School of Design in New York. Rothko had his first one-man shows in the early 1930s, in Portland and New York, as well as participating in cooperative exhibitions put on by the Artists Union. In the 1930s he associated closely with artists grouped around Milton Avery, including Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. He worked as an artist for the WPA in the late 1930s. In 1940, he changed his name to Mark Rothko (from Marcus Rothkowitz, his birthname). Initially influenced by German Expressionism and Surrealism, Rothko's characteristic minimalist abstract style didn't begin to emerge until the late 1940s. [More...]

Franz Kline was born in 1910 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and died in 1962. He studied art at Boston University in 1931-35 and Heatherly's School in London, England, in 1937-8. Moving to New York in 1939, he initially painted in the style of the Ashcan School, best typified by John Sloan. In the 1940s, he turned to Abstract painting, at first in a Cubist style. It wasn't until the 1950s that he began doing the large "caligraphic" black and white action paintings for which he became best known. [More...]