Action painting
Action painting names the gestural wing of Abstract Expressionism, defined by the critic Harold Rosenberg in his 1952 essay 'The American Action Painters'. Rosenberg's claim was that the modern canvas was no longer a space to compose a picture in but an arena to act in - what mattered was the event of painting itself. Jackson Pollock's poured drip paintings are the emblem; beside them stand Willem de Kooning's slashing figurations, Franz Kline's black architectures of stroke, and the improvisatory surfaces of Lee Krasner and Grace Hartigan. Techniques ranged from dripping and pouring to stabbing brushwork and paint applied with knives and rags. The idea of painting as a record of physical and psychic event made American art famous - and later drew charges of macho mythmaking that scholarship has spent decades unpacking.
Defining characteristics
- Spontaneous, improvised application: drips, pours, slashes and heavy impasto
- The canvas treated as an arena for action rather than a field for composition
- Traces of the artist's physical movement preserved in the surface
- Large scale, often worked unstretched on the studio floor
- Psychic automatism borrowed from Surrealism: the hand outrunning intention
Key figures
- Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) — Drip paintings made chance and gesture the heart of the work
- Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) — Aggressive, endlessly reworked surfaces from Woman to abstract landscapes
- Franz Kline (1910-1962) — Monumental black-and-white gestural structures
- Lee Krasner (1908-1984) — Improvisatory gestural paintings and collages of cut-up canvases
- Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) — Open gestural compositions and the Elegies to the Spanish Republic
Example works
- Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) — Jackson Pollock (1950)
- One: Number 31, 1950 — Jackson Pollock (1950)
- Woman I — Willem de Kooning (1950-52)
Sources
- Action painting - WikiArt institution
- Action painting - Wikipedia encyclopedia