An American post–WWII art movement, the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the centre of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.

Although the term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 regarding German Expressionism. In the USA, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Kandinsky.

Technically, an important predecessor is Surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of Masson and Ernst. In practice, the term is applied to many artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles and even to work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic 'action paintings' are different, both technically and aesthetically, from de Kooning's violent and grotesque figurative paintings and the studied rectangles of color in Rothko's paintings.