Action Painting

Action Painting, abstract, gestural style of painting adopted by certain members of the American Abstract Expressionist school. It involves dripping and splashing paint in an impulsive, loosely controlled manner without any predetermined design. The term was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 and applies primarily to the work of Jackson Pollock. It can also be applied in a more limited way to individual works or aspects of the works of other artists, such as Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, and Robert Motherwell. It is also sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for Abstract Expressionism itself, although many of the artists of this school did not paint in this manner.

Action painting has its technical origins in the automatic works of the Surrealists, for example, the drawings and sand paintings of André Masson. However, what distinguishes action painting is not so much a difference of technique but of understanding: influenced by Freudian psychology (see Sigmund Freud), the Surrealists believed that automatic art had the power to unlock and reveal the unconscious mind. As a consequence they saw such works as containing various symbolic, even figurative, elements that unveiled the artist's psyche. By contrast, the aesthetic of action painting emphasized the very act of painting itself, aside from any expressive or representational aspects it might have. An action painting constituted a moment of the artist's life frozen in paint, one of the artist's acts and thus a unique element of the artist's biography. It was an expression of the artist's personality only in a most primal and basic way. In his article “The American Action Painters” ( ARTnews, December 1952), where the term “Action painting” was first used, Rosenberg described the attitude thus: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Such paintings were therefore often understood in very formalist terms as merely the results of encounters between an artist and his materials.

Of necessity, action painting rendered certain traditional artistic practices redundant: for example, the idea of a sketch no longer had any meaning because it would suggest that the artist was trying to transfer some predetermined image on to a final, finished work. This purist, critical understanding of action painting was, however, undermined by artistic practice. Pollock, for example, did sometimes produce sketches before executing a drip painting and also cropped his paintings to give the most satisfying, “artistic” result. Nevertheless, the aesthetic suggested the possibility of a radical break from the European art tradition in a way that seemed liberating to many American artists accustomed to its dominant influence on their art. Indeed, it even came to influence many European artists, creating a counterpart in the Tachisme of artists such as Georges Mathieu. Action painting also affected other developments in modern art, notably the idea that a work of art should clearly bear the mark of its creative process, a notion central, for example, to the Process Art of the late 1960s and 1970s.