Gestural

Expressionism refers to art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas

In art, automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process

The term colour field painting is applied to the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour

The term action painters is applied to artists working from the 1940s until the early 1960s whose approach to painting emphasized the physical act of painting as an essential part of the finished work

Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity

The show at Tate St Ives this summer explores the international context which shaped the work of artists in the Cornish town from the 1940s to 1960s. As Éric de Chassey writes, the broad exchange of ideas was not limited to American artists such as Rothko and de Kooning, but extended to French painters such as Nicolas de Staël, which would also reflect a shared interest in nature and landscape

Coinciding with Cy Twombly’s 80th birthday, Tate Modern is staging the first retrospective of the American artist’s work for twenty years. Claire Daigle charts his time since the 1950s.