In studying, comparing, and contrasting the modes of creative expression termed Abstract Expressionism and Realism, it is important to have a good overview of the artistic movements within the realm of evolving human culture and what it meant for people to begin expressing themselves pictorially in new ways. Whenever there is important social change, shift, upheaval, revolution, or evolution, there comes with or even precedes it, a marked alteration in human expression, discourse, literature, art, and learning.
Abstract Expressionism originated in the United States around the end of World War II in the 1940s as the first style of painting to spring up in New York rather than in Europe and was a movement in free, experimental painting, embracing the concept of liberty in emotion.
Open to a variety of differing personal styles as noted in the famous works of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionist works were marked in common by the liberated technique, large canvases, and the wish to grant spontaneous or impulsive expression to the raw depths of human emotion through free abstractions in what could be termed as a nonrepresentational and improvisational mode (Doss).
On the other hand and perhaps toward the opposite extreme, Realism originated a bit earlier in Europe during the mid 1800s after the French Revolution and before World War I as a style of painting and sculpture in which the treatment of forms, colors, space, etc., was handled in such a manner as to place emphasis on the correspondence to natural actuality or to ordinary visual experience of nature, where figures and scenes were depicted as they are experienced or might be experienced in everyday life, even in the lives of the underclass and perhaps a reaction against elitism, illustrated in the well known works of artists such as Gustave Corbert, Marie Rosalie Bonheur, and Wilhelm Leibl (Batchelor, Fer, & Wood).
The Essay on Painting Styles 2
Neoclassicism, Impressionism and Abstract Expression all have their own style. Each is from a different era and reflect on different subjects. Neoclassicism was part of the European art movement during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The inspiration for this movement comes from thr classical art and culture of ancient Greece or ancient Rome. Neoclassic Artwork is very unemotional. In this ...
In observing two paintings of women by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning and Realist Wilhelm Leibl, one can sense the emotional, free flowing lines and vibrant colors which only barely create the visual form of a woman in Kooning’s Woman V in contrast to the precise, intentional lines and colors which carve a natural, ordinary, and realistic image of three German peasant women praying in a Bavarian countryside church in Leibl’s Three Women in Church (Leja).
Although both paintings offer beautiful conceptions of the female form, the differing efforts, perspectives, and modes of creation are certainly distinguished in the final results of the two works.
References
Batchelor, D., Fer, B., & Wood, P. (1993). Realism, rationalism, surrealism: art between the wars. Yale University Press.
Doss, E. (1991). Benton, Pollock, and the politics of modernism: from regionalism to abstract expressionism. University of Chicago Press.
Michael Leja, M. (1997). Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s. Yale University Press.
