The O’Brien Art Foundation and O’Brien Collection of American Art represent less frequently examined artists and throughlines within the narrative of Abstract Expressionism. This includes works by regional artists, female painters, and artists of color was overshadowed by the meteoric rise of white male painters among the downtown New York School. As demonstrated by the collections’ works from this period, artists living across the US—in California, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Texas, along with other peripheral but active US art centers—also contributed inventive approaches to redefining the meaning of art in the face of World War II’s inconceivable destruction and loss of human life. 

Responding to this devastation, AbEx artists throughout the country began in the 1940s to look within themselves, focusing on expressions of the unconscious and the existential through paint application. In a style characterized by energetic, gestural brushstrokes, marks, drips, and movement across the picture plane, their works emphasized the artist’s unique touch and, in turn, was believed to manifest inquiries into the agency of individuals and indexical presence of the artist.

Elaine de Kooning was an important and often overlooked figure represented in the collections with her painting Portrait of Tom Hess (1955). Although historically relegated to the shadows of her husband, Willem de Kooning, and perhaps better known as a figurative portrait painter, she was also an important player within the movement and an active critic and editor who wrote about AbEx for ArtNews. In this work, the artist renders a seated figure in gestural marks in which subject and ground seem to merge.

In contrast to the work of her husband, this painting turns the gaze to a male sitter: Hess, who was a key champion of Abstract Expressionism, writing frequently about the movement as editor of Art News and in two books: one on Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman and the other titled, Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art 1730-1970 (1973) with revered art historian, Linda Nochlin. 

Chicago-trained Leon Golub also drew on the figure in the late 1950s into the 1960s. His paintings of heads and naked figures were noticed by artists and critics who believed Abstract Expressionism should be devoid of references. The Orator IV (1962) exemplifies a “muscular painting” machismo displayed by many of his contemporaries, a sensibility which would later be challenged. 

In terms of regional diversity, Charles Pollock, the older brother of Jackson Pollock, is credited with helping to bring Abstract Expressionism to Michigan during his long tenure as an instructor at Michigan State University. From 1955-56, Pollock took a sabbatical to Lake Chapala, Mexico, where he completed approximately thirty fully realized drawings and fifteen paintings. His work Chapala IV (1956) evidences his interest during this period in drawing on calligraphic representations with a narrow palette.

In Untitled (c. 1971) by Kenneth V. Young, ambient spots of black and blue smear and blur into the raw canvas, only to reappear as round shapes to liquid effect. Young, who was born in Louisville, KY, intended to become an engineer but was instead inspired by his community within the regional Black artists group, Gallery Enterprise where he met artists such as Sam Gilliam, Gloucester Caliman Coxe, and Bob Thompson. These encounters led him to D.C. where he would work at the Smithsonian Institute and teach at the Corcoran School of Art from 1973 to 1985 while maintaining an active career as an artist.

Lawrence Kupferman was an abstract painter associated with the Boston Expressionist school in the early 1940s and later with Abstract Expressionism whose work exemplifies the biomorphic strain within the evolution of AbEx from Surrealism. Though Kupferman was more associated with the Boston School than with New York, art critic Francine A. Koslow reiterated his place as “a pioneer in the development of Abstract Expressionist technique and theory.” Tidal Arabesque (n.d.) is, like many of Kupferman’s works, characterized by amoeba-like offshoots and organic nodes suggestive of sea forms, unseen worlds, other non-human life forms, and the interior of the human body. As Koslow described in Artforum, the artist “responded to the lessons of surrealist automatism and biomorphism in a highly poetic and personal manner.” Kupferman, who taught at the Massachusetts College of Art, and John Grillo—represented by Untitled (1952)—were important connectors with New York painters such as Hans Hoffman and Kupferman’s friend Mark Rothko, who he met while spending summers in Provincetown.

Other artists whose works are rarely seen today but who were involved in the vibrancy of Provincetown include Nanno De Groot with Untitled (1950) and Giorgio Cavallon with Untitled (1953). Cavallon’s work  demonstrates painterly techniques that were quintessential to the movement but in smaller blocks of more tenderly applied color. The artist worked as the assistant of Arshile Gorky during his participation in the WPA in New York, where he was ultimately included in the legendary Ninth Street Show (1951), the artist-led exhibition that stood as the debut of Abstract Expressionism in a condemned building at 60 East 9th Street. 

Education throughout the country also influenced the trajectory of AbEx. Enzo Martinelli who is represented in the collection by Untitled (Abstraction) (1949), along with well-known figures Theodore Roszak and David Smith, formed a group of abstract artists who taught and worked at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, in the late 1940s and 1950s. Another key regional painter and educator was the Michigan-born Hassel Smith, who spent most of his career in California where he worked for the Farm Security Administration of the US Department of Agriculture and California State Relief Administration before teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in the 1940s. There he became the center of a community including modernist figures such as Ansel Adams, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, David Park, and Clyfford Still.

Works such as Smith’s Piano, Bass and Drums (1961) demonstrate his exceptionally contemporary and lyrical approach to Abstract Expressionism. Created while living in Sonoma Country from the 1950s to mid-1960s, the painting is part of the artist’s “Thunderbolt period,” marked by an aggressive application of paint focused less on color than the interruption of  fields of black by large, wide brushstrokes and thinner, calligraphic characters. Although his work was shown in important historic California galleries, such as Irving Blum, Walter Hopps, and the Ferus Gallery, Smith’s work has largely been forgotten due to the Bay Area’s marginalization in Abstract Expressionist narratives.

The Bay Area’s strain of abstraction with strengths in the immediacy of its marks and expanses of amorphous color (often informed by Clyfford Still), were overshadowed by critical reception at the time that work made in the region veered toward the decorative or designed. John Charles Haley was a cornerstone of Bay Area abstraction during the artist’s many years leading the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been credited with bringing West Coast painting to maturity.

In Echo/Silent Echo (1951), a bright palette with gestural marks is a prime example of the diverse directions that west coast Abstract Expressionism took in the post-War period. Another important regional center for post-War modernism was Black Mountain College in North Carolina, founded in 1933. Here, Joseph Fiore, who had been a student at the school under Albers, led the art department between 1951 and 1956. He painted Erie (1955) toward the end of his tenure.

Abstract Expressionist works evidenced an evolving experimentation with paint application and palette, albeit melded with an existential endpoint and self-reflexive investigation of painting itself. An almost spiritual element can be seen in the work of Second Generation AbEx artist Jack Youngerman whose gouache, Red/Yellow (1963) uses form and color to evoke what he described as a kind of lifeforce “to allow the shape to burst into being.”

Other works focused more on visible gestural strokes but were almost devoid of color, or resembled a deconstructed grid more closely than an all-over brushy application as in Calvert Coggeshall’s Untitled #9 (1954) and Haynes Ownby’s Oil 101 of the same year. 

While predominantly considered a movement focused on painting, artists working in sculpture and other media also redefined possibilities for abstraction at this time. Harold Cousins made important strides in bold expressive compositions in metal. Born in Washington, DC, the artist encountered the area’s music scene and artist community in the U-Street area—a vibrant district known informally as “Black Broadway” where he developed a sense of belonging and optimism for his chosen career away from the racism faced by so many Black artists. 

His work Plaiton, Long Standing (1958) is made of flattened slabs of metal that emphasize irregular shapes of the negative space around the work as much as the texture and configurations within the work’s structure itself. An example of his Plaiton series, the sculpture suggests patterns found in architecture and the natural world, here with brick-like component forms.

Other sculptors from the period such as Richard Stankiewicz reveal the ways in which Abstract Expressionism was indebted to Indigenous and non-Western histories of art-making and other traditions. Similarly, artists like Sal Sirugo were influenced by Chinese ink paintings, which the artist saw as authentic and untainted by mass produced culture.