action painting - Background, Historical context, The unconscious act, Notable action painters, References and notes
A form of abstract art which flourished in the USA from the late 1940s, its leading exponent being Jackson Pollock. The snappy term was introduced by the critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 in preference to the more cumbersome abstract expressionism, though the latter has not gone out of use. Many US art historians, for example, consider action painting to be a genre within abstract expressionism. The physical act of applying paint to canvas is emphasized, rather than the picture as a finished artefact; so the paint is thrown or dribbled onto the canvas which may be tacked to the floor. Persons may roll naked or ride bicycles across the wet surface. In France, a similar movement was called Tachisme (tache, blot, mark).
Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied . The resulting work emphasizes the physical act of painting itself. In theory, all young children are by nature very talented action painters, but the vast majority are forced to unlearn this art as part of their education.
Background
The style was widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, and is closely associated with abstract expressionism (some critics have used the terms "action painting" and "abstract expressionism" interchangeably). A comparison is often drawn between the American action painting and the French tachisme.
The term was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 and signaled a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of New York School painters and critics. While abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena within which to come to terms with the act of creation, earlier critics sympathetic to their cause, like Clement Greenberg, focused on their works' "objectness."
Rosenberg's critique shifted the emphasis from the object to the struggle itself, with the finished painting being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art, which was in the act or process of the painting's creation.
Over the next two decades, Rosenberg's redefinition of art as an act rather than an object, as a process rather than a product, was influential, and laid the foundation for a number of major art movements, from Happenings and Fluxus to Conceptual and Earth Art.
In an Aesthetic Realism Foundation study of Pollock's painting, Number One 1948, Lore Mariano shows how the aesthetic effect of this quintessential example of action painting arises from the way it is at once abandoned and accurate — that is, puts together the very opposites that "struggle" or are in conflict not only in the artist but in every individual .
Historical context
It is essential for the understanding of this movement to place it in historical context.
The unconscious act
This spontaneous activity was the "action" of the painter. The painter would let the paint drip onto canvases, often simply dancing around, or even standing on the canvases, and simply letting the paint fall where the subconscious mind wills, thus letting the unconscious part of the psyche express itself.
The effect the the artist would like to portray to the viewer is observing someone smothering out their finished cigarette. The Action Painters tried to show this a type of un-thought or spontaneous action.
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