CategoriesStyles and Movements
New York School
The painters, poets and composers of 1940s and 1950s Manhattan who made New York a centre of postwar avant-garde art.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for New York School are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In the 1940s a loose community of painters, poets and composers gathered in cheap lofts and bars of downtown Manhattan. Many had worked on the federal art projects of the 1930s or met the European Surrealists who sat out the war in New York, absorbing their interest in automatic, unplanned drawing. From 1949 they argued at the Club on East Eighth Street and drank at the Cedar Tavern.
The painters later called Abstract Expressionists formed its core, with no single style. Jackson Pollock poured paint across canvas laid on the floor, as in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950); Franz Kline dragged wide brushes into black, girder-like strokes; Barnett Newman divided fields of colour with narrow bands he called zips. The name also covers poets such as Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, the composers John Cage and Morton Feldman, and Aaron Siskind, whose photographs of weathered walls echo the paintings.
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