CategoriesStyles and Movements
Action Painting
Painting in which the physical act of making, the gesture and movement of the body, becomes the real subject of the work.
1 work · 10 related artists
About
In the summer of 1950 the photographer Hans Namuth recorded Jackson Pollock circling a canvas on the floor of his Long Island studio, pouring and flicking paint from sticks. Those pictures helped fix the idea that a painting could be the trace of an event. Two years later the critic Harold Rosenberg named the tendency in his essay “The American Action Painters” (1952).
The label describes the gestural wing of Abstract Expressionism: Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning. Look for sweeping, splattered or dragged marks, visible changes of mind and a scale set by the reach of the arm. Parallels arose elsewhere. In Japan the Gutai group's Kazuo Shiraga painted with his feet and Shozo Shimamoto hurled bottles of paint; in Paris Georges Mathieu painted before audiences. By the late 1950s Allan Kaprow was drawing on Pollock's example to devise the Happening.