and felt provincial with respect to Paris. The Abstract Expressionists also used "primitive" art as a way of cultural escape. They looked at tribal artifacts in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and believed it was disclosing one of the main buried roots of modernism. Cave paintings especially influenced many Abstract expressionists such as Pollock and Rothko. Aspects of cave paintings that were appealing to the Expressionists were the apparent lack of interest in composition. Sacred signs overlaid over unconfined surfaces were appealing because the artist was not restricted by a framing edge. They also admired the scale of cave paintings. They were very big and encouraged their followers to paint big. The most significant impact of primitive art was the cave paintings admirable freedom, which influenced the free, unbound style in which the abstract expressionists painted. The revolt of fascism and realism is freedom, which is articulated in the free form style of the Abstract Expressionist.Americans for generations had sought to achieve their own artistic maturity and had largely failed, either by inadequate assimilation of European models or by America's own provincialism. The Abstract Expressionist Movement was so influential because it was the first time that American artists were doing something new and different from Europe. American Artists for the first time had an advantage over Europe, which virtually transferred the center of the art world from Paris to New York. Ironically, it was the paralyzing poverty of the Great Depression that gave younger American artists their first advantage. Beginning in 1935, with the Federal Art Project organized under the Works Progress Administration, artists could earn a living as artists and do so free to create in whatever manner they might choose. "They could even gravitate to New York, traditionally America's safe haven for the revolutionary, and there ba...
