xt level of heights. When the economic and ideological interests began to fade away, a fresh form of thinking evolved. It was not just people's mental habits that changed the way of life, it was also the ways of life that changed people's mental habits. The developments in science and technology over the twentieth century have been accompanied by an unprecedented new forms and means of communications. Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, the artists whom we link together under the name Abstract Expressionists were also the product of the same tension that produced the forms, formations and deformations of their history. It was then, the tension became an art. Willem de Kooning was born in 1904, Arshile Gorky again in 1904, Adolf Gottlieb in 1903, Hans Hoffman in 1880, Barnett Newman in 1905, Mark Rothko in 1903, Clifford Still in 1904, Jackson Pollock in 1912, Ad Reinhardt in 1913 and Robert Motherwell in 1915. These artists' initial biographies were programmed around the people who were still living according to the principles set down in the nineteenth century. What artists like Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Motherwell and others were able to realize in the late forties and early fifties went far beyond the possibilities that were opened up by recent influences. The artists ranged from thirty to forty-two years old then and were coming into the mature periods of their lives and were expressing the maturity of the art. The economic and cultural circumstances in the United States conditioned and defined their art- the crash of 1929, the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, the American stance of neutrality towards World War II until December 1940. The term "Abstract Expressionism" is misleading. On its first appearance, it seemed like any genuine innovative style, breaking away with the past in a radical manner. By a clearer understanding it revealed that Abstract Expressionism flourished due to some reliable understanding o...
