What is Action Painting

Action painting is a direct, instinctive, and very dynamic sort of technique that takes the spontaneous technique of rapid, sweeping brushstrokes and the chance effects of dripping and spilling paint on the painting. The term was first called by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg to suit the style from a group of American Abstract Expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism) who utilized the method from 1950. Action painting is distinguishable from the delicately analysed pieces of the “abstract imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which signifies the other important direction seen in Abstract Expressionism and is comparable to Action painting only in the same complete importance to unrestricted personal expression free of the traditional aesthetic and social values.

The paintings of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov reflect the presence of the “automatic” techniques developed in Europe in the 1920s and '30s by the Surrealists. While Surrealist automatism (q.v.), which were scribblings created without the artist's conscious concepts, was conceptually designed to reveal unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic concept of the Action painters was essentially conceived as a means by which to give the artist's instinctive creative forces free play and of displaying these forces directly to the viewer. In Action painting, the very painting act being the time of the artist's creative relationship with his materials, was as significant as the completed piece.

It is generally seen that Jackson Pollock's abstract drip paintings, dating from 1947, pushed art to the bolder, gestural techniques that characterized Action painting. The rapid brushstrokes of de Kooning's “Woman” series, dating in the early 1950s, successfully transgressed a deliciously emotive, expressive technique. Action painting went on to have major importance throughout the 1950s in Abstract Expressionism, with the most significant art movement happening in the United States. By the 60s, however, leadership of the movement had transgressed to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters, who in the sixties rebelled against the irrational technique of the Action painters.

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