All-over painting

technique 1940s-1950s United States

All-over painting is not a style but a compositional approach: the surface is treated non-differentially, with no dominant focal point, no hierarchy between centre and edge, and often no indicated 'up'. The idea is most associated with the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and the dense white 'calligraphy' of Mark Tobey in the 1950s, though color field painting and some Cy Twombly canvases also qualify. The critic Clement Greenberg pointed to Janet Sobel's paintings as the first all-over work he had seen. Uniform treatment lets the eye roam without rest and turns the canvas into a field rather than a scene - a move that became one of the defining gestures of postwar American abstraction, even though the term itself names a device, not a movement.

​Henri Matisse, La danse (first version) 1909, oil on canvas, 8' 6 1/2" x 12' 9 1/2" (259.7 x 390.1 cm)
​Henri Matisse, La danse (first version) 1909, oil on canvas, 8' 6 1/2" x 12' 9 1/2" (259.7 x 390.1 cm)Public domain (credit: Henri Matisse （存活時間：1954）) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Uniform treatment of every part of the surface - edges equal to the centre
  • No dominant focal point or hierarchy of forms
  • Disorientation of orientation: no indicated top or bottom
  • Dense, continuous networks of marks - drips, scribbles, webs - spanning the canvas
  • Canvas read as an open field rather than a framed scene

Key figures

  • Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) — Drip paintings: the classic all-over surfaces
  • Mark Tobey (1890-1976) — Dense 'white writing' calligraphic all-over fields
  • Cy Twombly (1928-2011) — Scribbled canvases to which the all-over label has been applied
  • Janet Sobel (fl. 1940s) — Ukrainian-American painter Greenberg cited as the first all-over work he saw

Example works

Sources

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