| regionalism | A popular school of painters in the 1930s who aspired to a pure and proudly native art, one especially reflective of America's rural regions. Grant Wood's painting American Gothic is an example.
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| action painting | Within the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the highly improvisational, spontaneous approach to artistic creation pursued by painters such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. The term action painting denotes that the work of art arose "in process" (that is, in action) as opposed to being planned beforehand.
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| color field painting | The nonrepresentational approach to painting within the abstract expressionist movement that employs broad bands of flat, luminous color applied on mural-size canvases for the purpose of conveying basic human emotions and universal spiritual states. Exponents of this approach include Marc Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still.
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| post-painterly abstraction | A style of formalist abstraction rising to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s and growing from abstract expressionist color field painting. Post-painterly abstraction emphasizes flat and luminous color as an end in itself. The colorful "targets" of Kenneth Noland and brilliant "stripes" of Morris Louis are examples of this approach, which rejected the gestural "painterly" brushwork and emotional expressionism of the earlier abstract expressionist artists.
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| minimalism | A movement in art that arose in the 1960s characterized by a reductive focus on the most basic formal elements (color, shape, structure) of a work. The sculpture of Donald Judd and the early paintings and shaped canvases of Frank Stella are examples of the minimalist approach and style.
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