The New York School: Post-War Abstract Expressionism on 10th Street

The New York Movement (also called the New York School or 10th Street Expressionists) was a pivotal post-World War II art movement centered in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, particularly around 10th Street.

Emerging in the late 1940s and 1950s, it fused Surrealist automatism (spontaneous, subconscious creation) with hard-edged abstraction and gestural brushwork. Key figures included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell, though the "10th Street" label often refers specifically to the younger generation showing in artist-run cooperative galleries (Tanager, Hansa, March) rather than the uptown establishments.

This movement shifted the art world's epicenter from Paris to New York, establishing American abstract expressionism as the first globally dominant U.S. art movement.