) | a movement in experimental, nonrepresentational painting originating in the U.S. in the 1940s, with sources in earlier movements, and embracing many individual styles marked in common by freedom of technique, a preference for dramatically large canvases, and a desire to give spontaneous expression to the unconscious. |
| abstract expressionism n. A school of painting that flourished after World War II until the early 1960s, characterized by the view that art is nonrepresentational and chiefly improvisational. |
A school of art that flourished primarily from the 1940s to the 1960s, noted for its large-scale, nonrepresentational works by artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.