I think the problem is that you're comparing art pieces that have different purposes, and even more, different value systems. Those Soviet pieces are meant to b

I think the problem is that you're comparing art pieces that have different purposes, and even more, different value systems. Those Soviet pieces are meant to be poignant, they're meant to be instantly emotionally evocative, and they're immensely successful in creating great content. The artist there is valuing impact, and truthful representation of a thing, be it the horror of war or the heartbroken silence of world shattered by a letter. However, these works are derivative. They are not novel in how they show their content; they use the same techniques that were popularized and perfected years ago. This is fine, because these paintings are complete in and of themselves. Pollock on the other hand wasn't focused so much on the content of what he was creating, but on the process. Pollock wasn't trying to make you feel a thing, Pollock was trying to make a statement about what it means to be art. Pollock and other modern artists aren't looking to provide a story in isolation - they're iterating and expanding on a corpus of techniques, and means of representation, and questions about what it means to be art. Do I need to draw a person to show human suffering? Do I need to represent reality to make something meaningful? Can I create something that is recognizable as art while working under these arbitrary limitations? I think this is true of any art/skill/techne - once the art reaches a certain level of maturity and sophistication. For practitioners, the new frontiers are not in the content you create (because it's established that you can create anything) but the process by which you make it. Look at modern poetry, and literature. A lot of the time these are very tangled, frustrating pieces to read because they break with the forms we are used to and iterate on them. Many of these aren't written to tell a story, or to make you feel, but to explore how one tells a story, or how one paints a thought in words. You see this to an extent in programming - there's very little value to writing conway's tree of life in brainfuck or competing to see who can write the smallest program that can reproduce the mona lisa in ASCII, but we do it because these limitations are challenging and cool to us. (I'd argue that a Rothko painting can show just as much poignancy as any of those Soviet paintings you showed above.)