“The Expression of Terror: Abstract Expressionism and American Gothic Fiction”

Abstract

The Expression of Terror : Abstract Expressionism and American Gothic Fiction

Maria Antónia Lima (University of Évora – PORTUGAL)

In 1945, the abstract expressionist painter, Barnett Newman, concluded that after Hiroshima, he knew the terror to expect, because it had become as real as life. Many other American expressionist painters, such as Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning, tried to express this strong and violent emotion in their paintings. This leads us to think that many similarities, between American Gothic fiction and this modern art movement, can certainly be found. Both concentrate on the same kind of human emotion, which artists have a special urgency to express, whenever they feel confronted by the dangers of living in a society or time that have tendencies to create high levels of emotional sterility, which forbids individuals to feel their own humanity. If the origins of the Gothic are connected with the refusal of certain neoclassical ideals based in order, control and reason, which gave rise to a romantic search for freedom, emotion and imagination; the Abstract Expressionism was also concerned with similar states of consciousness in order to penetrate into the complexity of man’s inner self through the contact with the most irrational forces and impulses, represented through fractured forms and demonic figures that can become pictorial equivalents for many gothic fictions.