The abstract expressionists were hardly a threat to the power groups controlling society in the United States after World War II, but they did express an element of conflict between those power groups and the community of artists which were in conflict with the "official doctrine" of those groups. Certainly, in the late 1940s and early and mid-1950s, the official doctrine was that the world was at peace, the evils of Fascism had been conquered and destroyed, and reality consisted of happiness, prosperity, and harmony in the United States. This was the doctrine to which the groups in power in the period after World War II in the United States were trying to impose on the people of the United States. If those powers had been able to control the artists at work in abstract expressionism, they would have instructed them to conform to the official doctrine and to create works in which peace, prosperity, happiness and harmony were portrayed. As we read in Broom and Selznick, " In all societies, th

from without. Continuity may signify only the continuation of

the other. In periods of revolution, for example, change dominates, while in periods such as existed in the United States after World War II, continity dominates. Still, as we note, under the surface of this continuity there bubbled and brewed the seeds of discontent, symbolized in the highly revolutionary and individualistic work of the abstract expressionists.

painting, were sharpening perceptions outside the realm of the

Mark Rothko was another abstract expressionist, but he was

catastrophes: a depression and a world war. ... During the