It started since the end of World War II. Artists experimented so freely with so many media, such different styles and such a wealth of content. There were no settled ways and no fixed approach. Wave of immigrant artist who escaped the Nazis had settled largely in New York. Due to this, the center of the art world shifted to New York. Abstract Expressionism, it is spontaneous execution, large gestural brushstrokes, abstract imagery and field of intense color. It is a post World War II Art Movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the cener of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism. In the United States, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky. Figurative painting, sometimes written as Figurativism, particularly paintings and sculptures. Figurative art is often defined to contrast abstract art. The formal elements, those aesthetic effects created by design, upon which figurative art is dependent, include line, shape, color, light, and dark, mass, volume, texture, and perspective.