After the Second World War, the center of the art world shifted to New York, where Abstract Expressionism (1940s–1950s) became the first major American avant-garde movement. Emphasizing spontaneous, gestural mark-making, Jackson Pollock pioneered drip painting, laying canvases on the floor and pouring or flinging paint to create complex, energetic all-over compositions like Number 1A, 1948. Mark Rothko, by contrast, belonged to the related style of Color Field painting, producing large canvases of luminous, floating rectangular color fields, such as No. 61 (Rust and Blue), intended to evoke deep emotional and spiritual responses through color alone. Artists like Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler extended this concern with the optical and emotional impact of pure color.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Pop Art emerged in Britain and America, drawing imagery from mass media, advertising, comic books, and consumer culture, and thereby blurring the boundary between high art and popular culture. Andy Warhol became its most iconic figure with silkscreen prints of consumer products and celebrities, including the Campbell's Soup Cans and the Marilyn Diptych, which explored mass production, fame, and the commodification of culture. Roy Lichtenstein, meanwhile, appropriated comic strip imagery, employing Ben-Day dots and bold graphic style in works like Whaam! and Drowning Girl.
The 1960s and 1970s saw a turn away from painting toward more conceptual and dematerialized practices. Minimalism stripped art to essential geometric forms, using industrial materials and serial repetition, with artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Agnes Martin rejecting personal expression in favor of objectivity and pure form. Conceptual Art went further by prioritizing the idea or concept behind the work over its physical form; practitioners such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, and Yoko Ono argued that intellectual engagement mattered more than visual aesthetics. Performance art made the artist's body and actions the artwork itself, often performed live before an audience, with pioneers like Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, and Joseph Beuys challenging the boundaries between art and life. Installation art created immersive three-dimensional environments, with practitioners like Yayoi Kusama and Olafur Eliasson transforming gallery spaces through sculpture, video, sound, and light. Land Art, sometimes called Earth Art, created works directly in and from the natural landscape on a monumental scale; Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) and the wrapped landscapes of Christo and Jeanne-Claude are iconic examples. Photorealism, exemplified by Chuck Close and Richard Estes, returned to traditional painting with extraordinary precision, producing canvases that resembled high-resolution photographs.
Alongside these developments, individual artists forged singular paths. The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) created intensely personal self-portraits exploring identity, pain, and the body, influenced by Mexican folk art and Surrealism, with works like The Two Fridas remaining iconic. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) rose from New York City graffiti to international acclaim as a Neo-Expressionist, his raw, energetic paintings combining text, symbols, and figures to address themes of race, class, and power. Street art emerged as visual art created in public spaces, through murals, stencils, and wheat-paste posters, with figures like Keith Haring and Shepard Fairey bringing it from counterculture to mainstream recognition. Among contemporary street artists, the anonymous British figure known as Banksy is celebrated for satirical, politically charged stencil works like Girl with Balloon, which have made him one of the most famous artists of the present day.