the.com/abstract expressionism

means A mid-20th-century art movement where painters used abstract forms, gestural brushwork, and scale to express raw emotion and the subconscious rather than depicting recognizable subjects.

from The phrase itself is older than the movement — critics used 'abstract expressionism' as early as the 1910s to describe certain Kandinsky-like abstractions — but it got permanently attached to the New York painters of the 1940s-50s (Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning among them) who fused the emotional intensity of European Expressionism with total abstraction. 'Abstract' traces to Latin abstrahere, 'to drag away' — pulling form away from recognizable reality. 'Expressionism' comes from Latin exprimere, 'to press out' — squeezing inner feeling onto the outer surface. Together the words describe exactly what happened: feeling, dragged away from objects and pressed straight onto canvas.