Created for academic teaching by Jen Robinson, Associate Professor of Art History at Tallahassee Community College.

1. Abstract Expressionism
The Rise of AmericanArt

2. The World of AbEx
 Post WWII
 Spiritual and Cerebral
 Painter as Celebrity
 Male-Centric Movement

3. Theory
Greenberg Rosenberg
 Materials as
primary
 Art should be only
what its medium
allows
 “Action” Painting
 Art should
embrace theater

4. The Cold War
The BattleAgainst Social Realism

5. AbEx is Anti-Communism and Fascism
Mukhina,The
Worker and
the Collective
FarmWorker,
Soviet
Pavilion,
Paris
Exposition,
1937

6. Pollock
“Jack the
Dripper”
“I want to
express my
feelings rather
than illustrate
them.”
”There is no
accident, just as
there is no
beginning and no
end.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrVE-
WQBcYQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otBdXcWOE
LY

7. Pollock, Number 31

8. Number 31
“Pollock’s talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is
undisciplined…It is lavish, explosive, untidy…

9. Number 1-Lavender Mist
What we need is more young men who paint from inner compulsion without an
ear to what the critic or the spectator may feel—painters who will risk spoiling a
canvas to say something in their own way.”---Greenberg

10. Krasner and Pollock
“When I took Jackson to see Hoffmann, he said well your work is good,
but you don’t work from nature. Jackson said, ‘I am nature.’.”--Krasner

11. Krasner, Celebration

12. DeKooning: “The Slipping Glimpser”
Excavation

13. Woman I

14. Totem of Womanhood? Vagina Dentata?

15. Rothko, Untitled
Color-
Field
Painting

16.  “My works are about
tragedy, ecstasy and
doom.”
 “The people who weep
before my pictures are
having the same
religious experience I
had when I painted
them, and if you are
moved only by their
color relationships,
then you miss the
point.”

17. Untitled

18. Rothko Chapel
DeMenilCollection, Houston
Lavender Mist

19. Art Response #4
Identify the work (artist,
title, time period) and
then discuss two main
points you have learned in
reference to it and why it
fits into the time period.
Then state why the work
is relevant to the study of
art history. Your answers
must be detailed and use
proper essay format.