nched off into thousands of smaller, faster changing roads. Some of these roads, which can be seen as changing styles, or movements, in art, whipped Americans through a roller coaster of change in what they saw around them. The End of World War II:The major art movement taking place in the United States directly after World War II was abstract expressionism. The abstract expressionist movement devoted itself to the principles that art is most expressive when a relationship is established between the artist and the spectator . For the most part, abstract expressionism attracted the American public with its simple methods and spontaneous appearance and more so because it was an entirely American art movement. With most of Europe at war and in recovery during the 1940s, Americans were left with the principal responsibility of developing art. Abstract expressionism was, therefore, the first movement to originate in the United States. During the war in the times of chaos that existed in the world, America met the challenge of being the leader in art and developing their own movement which would span the 1940s and the 1950s. One of the most important artists in abstract expressionism was Jackson Pollack (see appendix A). Pollacks work runs throughout the span of the movement. The famous method of action painting which Pollack developed was much like the times he, and the other artists who practiced this method, lived in. While there appears to be chaos in the erratic and loose placement of paint and strokes, there is still a great sense of the pieces being defined and controlled . The abstract expressionists thought of their paintings as living things. In Jackson Pollacks My Painting, from 1947, he says, The source of my painting is the unconscious . The world around Pollack and all world citizens at this point was chaoticcommunism was running rampant, war had ripped throughout Europe, the nuclear bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Yet, in ...