A Brief overview of American Lyrical Abstraction:

American Lyrical Abstraction is an art movement that emerged in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and then Toronto and London during the 1960s–1970s. Characterized by intuitive and loose paint handling, spontaneous expression, illusionist space, acrylic  staining, process, occasional imagery, and other painterly and newer technological techniques. Lyrical Abstraction led the way away from minimalism in painting and toward a new freer expressionism. Painters who directly reacted against the predominating Formalist, Minimalist, and Pop Art and geometric abstraction styles of the 1960s, turned to new, experimental, loose, painterly, expressive, pictorial and abstract painting styles. Many of them had been Minimalists, working with various monochromatic, geometric styles, and whose paintings publicly evolved into new abstract painterly motifs. American Lyrical Abstraction is related in spirit to Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting 

and European Tachisme of the 1940s and 1950s as well. Tachisme refers to the French style of abstract painting current in the 1945–1960  eriod. Very close to Art Informel, it presents the European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism.

As a movement, Lyrical Abstraction extended the post-war Modernist aesthetic and provided a new dimension within the abstract tradition 

which was clearly indebted to Jackson Pollock's "dripped painting" and Mark Rothko's stained, color forms. This movement was born out of 

a desire to create a direct physical and sensory experience of painting through their monumentality and emphasis on color – forcing the viewer to "read" paintings literally as things. During 2009 the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida hosted an exhibition entitled Expanding Boundaries: Lyrical Abstraction 

Lyrical Abstraction arose in the 1960s and 70s, following the challenge of Minimalism and Conceptual art. Many artists began moving away from geometric, hard-edge, and minimal styles, toward more lyrical, sensuous, romantic abstractions worked in a loose gestural style. These "lyrical abstractionists" sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting, and to revive and reinvigorate a painterly "tradition" in American art. At the same time, these artists sought to reinstate the primacy of line and color as formal elements in works composed according to aesthetic principles – rather than as the visual representation of sociopolitical realities or philosophical theories.

Characterized by intuitive and loose paint handling, spontaneous expression, illusionist space, acrylic staining, process, occasional imagery,  and other painterly techniques, artists like Dick Wray, Perry House, and Dorthy Hood first recognized as a major element of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts "Fresh Paint" exhibition curated by Barbara Rose and Susie Kalil in 1985.