    Left: Mark Rothko, Orange and Tan, 1954, National Gallery of Art, Gift of Enid A. Haupt © 1999 Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel 1977.47.13 Right: Franz Kline, Four Square, 1956, National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine 1971.87.12
In the late 1940s Pollock was among a group of young, mostly New York painters
who became known as abstract expressionists. They worked in a variety of styles, but generally shared
a commitment to creating large-scale, abstract works, an interest in Jungian
psychological theories of the collective unconscious and primitive mythology, and a belief that
expressiveness was achieved, in part, through the physical process of painting.
Projecting the imprint of philosophy, art history, and the human experience into visual
form, these artists incorporated both chance and control while painting with a physical
immediacy and gesture. During the early 1950s two somewhat divergent stylistic tendencies emerged within this movement:
chromatic abstraction, as seen in the coloristic paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and gestural abstraction or action painting, as exemplified by the energetically brushed works of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock.
  
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