What Is Action Painting

By Author: Roger Corbett
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Action painting is a direct, instinctive, and very dynamic kind of technique that uses the excited style of speedy, sweeping brushstrokes and the by-luck effects of dripping and spilling paint over the artwork. The term was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in his attempt to signify the work from a group of American Abstract Expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism) who had utilized the method since around 1950. Action painting is distinguishable from the delicately preplanned works of the “abstract imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which consists of the other important direction viewed in Abstract Expressionism and is parallelable to Action painting only in their likewise utter significance to unhindered personal expression free of any traditional aesthetic and social values.

The paintings of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov highlight the importance of the “automatic” techniques that came about in Europe in the 1920s and '30s by the ...
... Surrealists. While Surrealist automatism (q.v.), which consisted of scribblings created without the artist's conscious concepts, was initially designed to awaken unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic intent of the Action painters was fundamentally conceived as a process of giving the artist's instinctive creative forces freedom and of showing these forces directly to the viewer. In Action painting, the very painting act being the purity of the artist's personal relationship with his piece, was as important as the finished work.

It is commonly held that Jackson Pollock's abstract drip paintings, seen from 1947, pushed art to the bolder, gestural techniques that are particular to Action painting. The rapid brushstrokes of de Kooning's “Woman” series, created in the early 50s, successfully transgressed a thickly emotive, expressive trend. Action painting went on to have major influence during the 50s in Abstract Expressionism, with the most important art movement occurring in America. By the end of the decade, however, leadership of the movement had moved to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters, the followers of whom in the sixties rebelled against the irrational technique of the Action painters.
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