old Europe. For more than half a century, thegeneral European public had been bombarded of a variety of artexercises. But new wave of artists in Europe and United Statessaw in change in its future. Abstract was a natural evolution.It would finally liberate artists from the claims of traditionand lift art to the next level of heights. When the economic andideological interests began to fade away, a fresh form ofthinking evolved. It was not just people's mental habits thatchanged the way of life, it was also the ways of life thatchanged people's mental habits. The developments in science and technology over thetwentieth century have been accompanied by an unprecedented newforms and means of communications. Born at the beginning of thetwentieth century, the artists whom we link together under thename Abstract Expressionists were also the product of the sametension that produced the forms, formations and deformations oftheir history. It was then, the tension became an art. Willemde Kooning was born in 1904, Arshile Gorky again in 1904, AdolfGottlieb in 1903, Hans Hoffman in 1880, Barnett Newman in 1905,Mark Rothko in 1903, Clifford Still in 1904, Jackson Pollock in1912, Ad Reinhardt in 1913 and Robert Motherwell in 1915. Theseartists' initial biographies were programmed around the peoplewho were still living according to the principles set down in thenineteenth century. What artists like Pollock, de Kooning,Kline, Motherwell and others were able to realize in the lateforties and early fifties went far beyond the possibilities thatwere opened up by recent influences. The artists ranged fromthirty to forty-two years old then and were coming into themature periods of their lives and were expressing the maturity ofthe art. The economic and cultural circumstances in the UnitedStates conditioned and defined their art- the crash of 1929, theelection of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, the American stance ofneutrality towards World War...
