CategoriesStyles and Movements
Post-War American Art
American art from 1945 to about 1970, from Abstract Expressionism through Neo-Dada and Pop to Minimalism and Conceptual art.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Post-War American Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The quarter-century after 1945 saw American art move from provincial ambition to international influence. European émigrés, the federal art programmes of the Depression and the GI Bill, which paid for veterans' art training, had widened the pool of artists, and Black Mountain College in North Carolina brought painters, dancers, poets and composers together.
Abstract Expressionism came first: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell made scale and gesture carry tragic meaning. In the mid-1950s Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns let everyday things back in, as in Johns's Flag (1954–55), while John Cage's silent 4′33″ (1952) opened art to chance and ambient sound. Happenings, Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art followed one another quickly in the 1960s, and photographers from Robert Frank to Diane Arbus reshaped the documentary tradition. Romare Bearden's photomontages of Black life and the protest art of the Vietnam years brought politics back to the surface.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Post-War European Art
Post-World War I European Classicism
Post-World War II School of Paris
Postminimalism
Pre-Raphaelites
Pre-World War II School of Paris
Precisionism
Process Art
Progressive Artists' Movement
Purism
Relational Aesthetics
Renaissance
Rinpa School
Rococo Art and Design
