Terms of the Day for October 31

• Abstract Expressionism – the first specifically American art movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, it combined the emotional intensity of German Expressionism with the abstraction of Futurism and Synthetic Cubism.
• Automatism – the Surrealist act of automatic writing or drawing done as a means of accessing symbols of the subconscious.
• Action Painting – a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist.
• Color-Field Painting – a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s that  is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. In color-field painting  “color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself.”