What is Action Painting?
Action painting is a direct, instinctive, and very dynamic type of painting that uses the erratic style of speedy, long brushstrokes and the by-luck effects of dripping or spilling paint onto the painting. The label was first coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in order to label the work of a group of American Abstract Expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism) who had been using the method from about 1950. Action painting is distinguished from the carefully conceptual artworks of the “abstract imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which represents the other key direction implied in Abstract Expressionism and is comparable to Action painting only in its complete devotion to unfettered personal expression free of all traditional aesthetic and/or social values.
The works of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov display the presence of the “automatic” techniques that progressed in Europe through the 1920s and ’30s by the Surrealists. While Surrealist automatism (q.v.), which involved scribblings performed without the artist’s conscious control, was conceptually utilized to bring out unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic intent of the Action painters was primarily conceived as a means by which to give the artist’s instinctive creative forces free reign and of exposing these forces directly to the viewer. In Action painting, the act of painting being the purity of the artist’s real point of contact with his piece, was as notable as the finished work.
It is commonly understood that Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings, executed from 1947, lit the path to the bolder, gestural techniques that are particular to Action painting. The speedy brushstrokes of de Kooning’s “Woman” series, dating in the early fifties, successfully transgressed a fully emotive, expressive trend. Action painting was of major significance during the 50s in Abstract Expressionism, with the most important art movement at the time in the US. By the end of the decade, however, leadership of the movement had shifted to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters, the followers of whom in the 60s rebelled against the irrational technique of the Action painters.
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