Action Painting

Action Painting. A type of dynamic, impulsive painting, practised by certain Abstract Expressionists, 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 has been used loosely as a synonym for Abstract Expressionism, but this usage is misleading, as Action Painting represents only one aspect of the 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 saw 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: ‘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, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.’ Although the term ‘Action Painting’ 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.’ To many conservative critics it seemed that such pictures were mindless and lacking in craft, but Pollock (somewhat at variance with his words above) played down the role of chance: ‘When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident.’ The German-born photographer Hans Namuth (1915–90), who documented Pollock's method in a famous series of pictures, wrote of seeing him at work: ‘It was a great drama—the flame of explosion when the paint hit the canvas; the dancelike movement; the eyes tormented before knowing where to strike … my hands were trembling.’

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 pour coloured earth onto the ground to form elaborate patterns. Irving Sandler (Abstract Expressionism, 1970) writes: ‘It must be stressed that Pollock's “drip” painting evolved primarily from the slow internal development of his own style, and from suggestions by Graham and the surrealist automatists, which fostered this development … Perhaps the Navajo Indians did influence Pollock … not because they taught him the “drip” technique, but rather because they obliterated their pictures at the close of their ritualistic ceremony. To them, the act of painting was more important as magic than as picture-making. Their attitude may have given Pollock the confidence to take liberties with conventional approaches to painting.’ Whatever his sources, Pollock used Action Painting to produce 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 gave rise to a good deal of outrage and mockery, especially after the British painter William Green (1934–2001) took to riding a bicycle over the canvas. This feat, which was imitated by the comedian Tony Hancock in the film The Rebel (1961), inspired a poem in the journal Studio:

Where Pollock spilled, now others ride,

Anxious to show they've nothing to hide.

Not even talent need get in the way,

When you're hep on a bike with nothing to say. In a similar vein, in 1955–6, various members of the Gutai Group in Japan produced Action Paintings through highly unorthodox means: one of them painted with his feet whilst hanging from a rope, for example, and another used a remote-controlled model car rigged with a can of paint. These burlesque aspects of Action Painting have an interesting precedent in Japanese art in the work of the great Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), 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.