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► New York City
During the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s many artists fled Europe to the United States.
By the early 1940s the main movements in modern art, expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism, and dada were represented in New York:
Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ernst, André Breton, were just a few of the exiled Europeans who arrived in New York.
The rich cultural influences brought by the European artists were distilled and built upon by local New York painters. The climate of freedom in New York allowed all of these influences to flourish. The art galleries that primarily had focused on European art began to notice the local art community and the work of younger American artists who had begun to mature. Certain of these artists became distinctly abstract in their mature work.
Eventually American artists who were working in a great diversity of styles began to coalesce into cohesive stylistic groups. The best known group of American artists became known as the Abstract expressionists and the New York School.
In New York City there was an atmosphere which encouraged discussion and there was new opportunity for learning and growing. Artists and teachers John D. Graham and Hans Hofmann became important bridge figures between the newly arrived European Modernists and the younger American artists coming of age. Mark Rothko, born in Russia, began with strongly surrealist imagery which later dissolved into his powerful color compositions of the early 1950s.
The expressionistic gesture and the act of painting itself, became of primary importance to Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. While during the 1940s Arshile Gorky's and Willem de Kooning's figurative work evolved into abstraction by the end of the decade. New York City became the center, and artists worldwide gravitated towards it; from other places in America as well.
► Abstract Art Definition
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.
"With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create."
Kasimir Malevich, (1879-1935) Painter.
“Why should not the camera artist break away from the worn out conventions... and claim the freedom of expression which any art must have to be alive.”
Alvin Langdon Coburn, (1882-1966) Photographer.
"The people who call my work 'abstract' are imbeciles.. what they call 'abstract' is in fact the purest realism, the reality of which is not represented by external form but by the idea behind it, the essence of the work. "
Constantin Brancusi, (1876-1957) Sculptor.