Today we touched on a handful of important styles and movements that were born in the wake of the Second World War. The mass exodus of artists and creatives following WW2 from Europe to America made New York the new center of the art world. The first truly American art movement to sweep the world was Abstract Expressionism, a movement split into gestural and color-field abstract subgroups. Gestural Abstract Expressionists, like Pollock and de Kooning, used frenetic and energetic brushstrokes to create abstract compositions that reflected both the actions of the artist and the mental states of their painters. Conversely, color-field painters filled canvases with thin layers of vibrant hues, typically shades of the same color, to explore the emotional environments that colors themselves created. This is not to say that the arts fell off completely in Europe. From de Stijl to Purism, European art took on a muted and intellectual form following the Second World War. Perhaps disillusioned with the march of progress and the rise of brutal totalitarian regimes, Western European artists strove to democratize art by championing functionalism in all aspects of design. For Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Le Corbusier’s Purism, buildings and objects were stripped down to their most simple geometries and colors, albeit with different interpretations of what this reductionism fundamentally entailed. De Stijl artists, for example, drove to uncover the hidden mathematical code of life itself, whereas Bauhaus artists, many of whom held Communist sympathies, sought to create goods and homes for a more equitable and less consumeristic world.