Jackson Pollock's Industrial Expressionism

In 1957 the art historian Meyer Schapiro suggested that the significance of avant-garde art lay in its positing of an alternative to the technological extremes of corporate capitalism, observing that, within the developmental logic of modernity, the realm of the historically fine arts of painting and sculpture was the last refuge from total instrumentality. Schapiro asserted further that American avant-garde painting, i.e., Abstract Expressionism, addressed this charge more vigorously than had any avant-garde art movement before it, by formulating techniques that seemed to wed intention more closely to expression. Among these, according to Schapiro, were spontaneity and an innovative use of line, exemplified by the allover, linear “signature” of Jackson Pollock's poured canvases of the late 1940s.