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Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and
inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. The Great
Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither
of which satisfied this group of artists' desire to find a content rich with meaning and
redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. The Great
Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the
Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in
which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a
career path.
But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for
the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing
avant-garde art from Europe. The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there
artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. They were
also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and
Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of
Matisse, Léger, andPicasso, among others. Another forum for viewing the most advanced
art was Albert Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, which was housed at New York University
from 1927 to 1943. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El
Lissitzky, and others. The forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—the
Museum of Non-Objective Painting—opened in 1939. Even prior to that date, its
