Editing Abstract expressionism (section)

==== Pollock and Abstract influences ====

During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all [[Contemporary art]] that followed him. To some extent, Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like [[Picasso]]'s innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via [[Cubism]] and constructed sculpture, with influences as disparate as [[Navajo people|Navajo]] [[sand painting]]s, surrealism, Jungian analysis, and Mexican mural art,<ref>Appignanesi, Richard, et al., ''Introducing Postmodernism,'' Ikon Books, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2003, p. 30</ref> Pollock redefined what it was to produce art. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw [[canvas]] on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials; linear skeins of paint dripped and thrown; drawing, staining, brushing; imagery and non-imagery—essentially took art-making beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism in general expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art.

The other abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Pollock, [[Willem de Kooning|de Kooning]], [[Franz Kline]], [[Mark Rothko|Rothko]], [[Philip Guston]], [[Hans Hofmann]], [[Clyfford Still]], [[Barnett Newman]], [[Ad Reinhardt]], [[Richard Pousette-Dart]], [[Robert Motherwell]], [[Peter Voulkos]], and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them.  The radical Anti-Formalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s including [[Fluxus]], [[Neo-Dada]], [[Conceptual art]], and the [[feminist art movement]] can be traced to the innovations of abstract expressionism. Rereadings into abstract art, done by art historians such as [[Linda Nochlin]],<ref>Nochlin, Linda, Ch.1 in: ''Women Artists at the Millennium'' (edited by C. Armstrong and C. de Zegher) MIT Press, 2006.</ref> [[Griselda Pollock]]<ref>Pollock, Griselda, ''Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive''. Routledge, 2007.</ref> and [[Catherine de Zegher]]<ref>De Zegher, Catherine, and Teicher, Hendel (eds.), ''3 X Abstraction''. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005.</ref> critically shows, however, that pioneer women artists who have produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by the official accounts of its history, but finally began to achieve long overdue recognition in the wake of the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Abstract expressionism emerged as a major art movement in New York City during the 1950s and thereafter several leading art galleries began to include the abstract expressionists in exhibitions and as regulars in their rosters. Some of those prominent 'uptown' galleries included: the [[Charles Egan Gallery]],<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xPBPAQAAIAAJ&q=%22charles+egan+gallery%22+abstract|title=George McNeil|last1=McNeil|first1=George|year=2008}}</ref> the [[Sidney Janis|Sidney Janis Gallery]],<ref>{{cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0uYCAAAAMBAJ&q=%22janis+gallery%22+abstract&pg=PA50|title=Janis Gallery abstract|work=New York Magazine|access-date=2016-03-20|date=January 31, 1972}}</ref> the [[Betty Parsons Gallery]],<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sNCJAwAAQBAJ&q=%22betty+parsons+gallery%22+abstract&pg=PA244|title=The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts|isbn=9781573441919|last1=Summers|first1=Claude J.|year=2004}}</ref> the [[Kootz Gallery]],<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YgALtJ2GKIUC&q=%22kootz+gallery%22+abstract&pg=PA302|title=New York Modern|isbn=9780801867934|last1=Scott|first1=William B.|last2=Rutkoff|first2=Peter M.|date=August 24, 2001}}</ref> the [[Tibor de Nagy Gallery]], the [[Stable Gallery]], the [[Leo Castelli|Leo Castelli Gallery]] as well as others; and several downtown galleries known at the time as the [[Tenth Street galleries]] exhibited many emerging younger artists working in the abstract expressionist vein.