Action Painting

Action Painting. A type of dynamic, impulsive painting in which the artist applies paint with energetic gestural movements—sometimes by dribbling or splashing—and with no preconceived idea of what the picture will look like. Sometimes the term is employed loosely as a synonym for Abstract Expressionism, but such usage is misleading, as Action Painting represents only one aspect of that movement. The term was coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg in an article entitled ‘The American Action Painters’ in Art News in December 1952. Rosenberg regarded Action Painting as a means of giving free expression to the artist's instinctive creative forces and he regarded the act of painting itself as more significant than the finished work. Although the term soon became established, many critics were unconvinced by Rosenberg's idea of the canvas being ‘not a picture but an event’: Mary McCarthy, for example, wrote that ‘you cannot hang an event on a wall, only a picture’. Rosenberg's article did not mention individual painters and was unillustrated, but the artist who is associated above all with Action Painting is Jackson Pollock, who vividly described how he felt when working on a canvas laid on the floor: ‘I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting…When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.’

There have been numerous accounts of how Pollock came to develop his drip technique, including an unlikely story that the idea came to him when he accidentally kicked over a can of paint. A theory that has been much discussed is that he was influenced by sand paintings of the Navajo Indians of New Mexico, who in certain rituals spill coloured earth onto the ground to form elaborate patterns. Whatever his sources, Pollock used Action Painting to create what are generally regarded as some of the greatest abstract pictures ever created. In the work of lesser artists, however, the technique could easily degenerate into messy self-indulgence, and it generated a good deal of outrage and mockery, especially after the British painter William Green (1934–2001) took to riding a bicycle over the canvas, a feat imitated by the comedian Tony Hancock in the film The Rebel (1961). These burlesque aspects of Action Painting were anticipated by the great Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (see Ukiyo-e), who in his early years used to create huge pictures in front of festival crowds, using a broom and a bucket of ink, and on one occasion dipped the feet of a chicken in paint and let it run over his paper.