Action Painting Exposed November 23, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Action painting is a direct, instinctive, and very dynamic type of art that consists of the impulsive use of vigorous, long brushstrokes and the by-luck effects of dripping and spilling paint all over the canvas. The style was first coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg to signify the artwork of a group of American Abstract Expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism) who used the method from 1950. Action painting is distinguished from the intricately preconceived artwork of the “abstract imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which represents the other important direction implied in Abstract Expressionism and is parallelable to Action painting only in their shared utter devotion to unfettered personal expression free of all traditional aesthetic and social values.
The paintings of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov display the influence of the “automatic” techniques that progressed in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s by the Surrealists. While Surrealist automatism (q.v.), which involved scribblings created without the artist’s conscious concepts, was conceptually used to draw unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic technique of the Action painters was rather conceived as a means of giving the artist’s instinctive creative forces freedom and of revealing these forces directly to the viewer. In Action painting, the very painting act being the purity of the artist’s physical interaction with his work, was as significant as the final work.
It is well understood that Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings, seen from 1947, initiated the bolder, gestural techniques that are particular to Action painting. The intense brushstrokes of de Kooning’s “Woman” series, created in the early 1950s, successfully evolved a deliciously emotive, expressive trend. Action painting was of major influence throughout the 50s in Abstract Expressionism, with the most important art movement happening in the US. By the sixties, however, leadership of the movement had transgressed to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters, the followers of whom in the sixties rebelled against the irrational styles of the Action painters.
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