Abstract Expressionism—among the most celebrated movements in art history—emerged in New York in the 1940s and ’50s. “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture,” Jackson Pollock explained. Historically, Abstract Expressionism has been divided into two tendencies: Gestural Abstraction (or Action Painting), which emphasizes the energy of the painter’s mark, and Color Field Painting, which focuses on the interplay between swathes of color. In the past decade, museum retrospectives and rising auction records have spotlighted the historically overlooked women of the post-war movement, such as Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Alma Thomas, who pushed Abstract Expressionism forward by spearheading new techniques and styles.
