Action Painting

“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, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture, but an event”.

Rosenberg, H., ‘The American Action-Painters’ in Tradition of the New, originally in Art News, 51/8 Dec. 1952, p.22

Jackson Pollock, Hans Namuth, 1950, photograph, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Source: http://www.aaa.si.edu/

Action Painting, sometimes referred to as 'gestural abstraction' is a style of painting which involves the act of dripping, pouring or splashing paint onto the canvas instead of applying layers of paint carefully or gradually. The term was coined by art critic Harold Rosenberg in Art News of December 1952, and emphasised how the artwork was regarded as residue, with the physical act of painting being seen as the true work of art. 

The term applies to artists working between 1940-1960 in America. Although Rosenberg never named the specific artists he was referring too, it is commonly understood that his essay was referencing the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and Willem De Kooning, whose paintings are large in scale and often characterised by violent and spontaneous markings of paint upon the canvas.