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One of the driving forces behind Abstract Expressionism was a desire to free painting from the hierarchy of subject/object relationship, so that meaning could be derived by the viewer through direct perception rather than relying upon reference to association or representation.
This movement gave birth to gesture painting which strove to restrict the content of a painting to the quality of the brush strokes of the artist: Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, culminating in the action painting of Jackson Pollock; and minimalism which reduced content to basic form and color: early Frank Stella, for instance.
By the end of the 20th Century many artists were moving away from this style of painting returning again to some form of narrative or representation, but in many cases exploiting the freedom of content that abstraction had opened up. For example, many of the early photo realism artists of the 1970s and '80s utilized ordinary scenes from everyday life, like a station wagon parked in a suburban driveway, taken out of context or 'abstracted' from any specific reference. This gave the viewer little or no clues to meaning other than the experience of line, color, and form - but with subject matter so specifically defined that practically any narrative meaning could be imposed.
From these subsequent and derivative forms of abstraction, it became increasingly clear to such artists as Robert Irwin that nothing, including a painting, can exist as a meaningful experience completely free of context. At the very least, the simple act of hanging a monochrome panel on a wall creates a relationship: between the panel and the wall, between this wall and that wall, and so on.
Since meaning in abstraction relies entirely on individual interpretation, Abstract Expressionism is occasionally referred to by some critics as contributing to the propagation of the moral relativism of post modernism. While it is true that meaning in abstract painting is relative depending upon the viewer, there is an inherent visual language of line, color, and form (as pitch, volume, and rhythm in music) that, when understood, can be used to express specific and at times subtle experiences, that would be otherwise inexpressible.
As music evokes specific moods when constructed coherently, so too can painting through the fluent use of its language independent of, or in juxtaposition to, narrative or pictorial content. By moving beyond the confines of both, Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Fuller Potter, made explicit in painting what had in the past been implicit: how the visual language functions to inform the perception of the viewer.
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