Abstract Expressionism is an art movement that prided itself on its lack of meaning, that its large canvases were displayed for themselves, for their own sake, for what they were. A canvas need have no meaning, representational or otherwise, which is what Jackson Pollock said when he gave one of his many interviews about his art. He parried the question about the meaning of his art with the question: you don’t ask a field of flowers what they mean, do you? Actually, it is possible to give an even more radical characterization of what came to be called Abstract Expressionism, the movement  first called “action painting”, in that it was a set of actions perpetrated by the painters and also because the paintings were so kinetic, which is not really true either, because that is only true of Pollock, because Rothkos, for their part, just sit there, taking you inside them as you contemplate them some more.