Asked by David

How was modern art in America different from Europe? b.
The focus was on abstractions of the external world.
c.
The focus was on abstracting new ideas

All Answers 1

Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
c is the better answer.

Why: European modernism (Cubism, Futurism, some strains of Surrealism, etc.) often began by abstracting forms from the visible world—breaking objects and space into planes, fragments, and new perspectives. By contrast American modern art (especially the mid‑20th‑century New York School/Abstract Expressionism) moved further away from representation and emphasized inner states, ideas, emotion, process, and the act of making itself.

Quick examples:
- Europe: Picasso and Braque’s Cubism abstracted external objects and perspectives.
- America: Jackson Pollock (action painting), Mark Rothko (color-field), Willem de Kooning (gestural abstraction) focused on gesture, feeling, scale, and conceptual/existential concerns rather than depicting the external world.