Coined as a critical term in relation to the work of Wassily Kandinsky abstract expressionism generally refers to the artistic movement that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, known more broadly as New York School Painting. Born of a confluence of European immigration and American regionalism, abstract expressionism, or, as the critic Harold Rosenberg dubbed it, “Action Painting,” ranged from the intricately woven paint skeins of Jackson Pollock’s “all-over” abstractions to the gestural violence of Willem de Kooning’s figurative female portraits.

Originally celebrated as an unmitigated triumph of American cultural ascendancy, most resoundingly and enduringly in the contemporaneous criticism of Clement Greenberg, and retrospectively in the art historical work of Irving Sandler, in the 1970s, revisionist social art historians explored the degree to which its success stemmed from the easy metaphoric affinity of the presumed individuality and freedom evinced in its surfaces with the rhetoric of Cold War political ideology.

More recent feminist scholarship has excavated and interrogated the ways in which gender and identity shaped both the production and reception of New York School Painting, as is powerfully emblematized in a juxtaposition of “Jack the Dripper,” who “spread paint like seed,” upon the prone canvas with the Color-Field painter Helen Frankenthaler, who “bled” upon the unprimed canvas with her painterly “stains” and “flows.”