How Action Painting Splashed its Way into Art History

Emerging from the ashes of World War II, Action Painting revolutionized art with its visible and frenetic movement on the canvas. It replaced traditional emphasis on the form, resulting in art that fizzed with the energy of how it had been produced and made artists like Jackson Pollock a household name who transformed the focus of an artwork.

Within the conformist culture of the Cold War, a rising trend emerged in American art of the 1940s and 1950s for Action-based painting, in which gestures giving a sense of how the paint was applied to the canvas became an integral part of the final artwork.

Painted using bold actions that demanded more of the artist’s physical body than traditional easel painting, figural work was rendered outmoded in a wave of popular abstraction. Broad brushstrokes, drips, splashes, and even the artist hanging from the ceiling and painting with feet (really) represented a wave of physical action on the canvas that defined the energy of Action Painting.

As an abstract, purely formal and intuitive means of expression, Action Painting carved and splashed a space to engage in a creative dialogue with materials in an act of energetic rebellion.

What is Action Painting?

Never before had gestures played such a pivotal role in the final outcome of an artwork, but then never before had the art world seen anything like Action Painting. Sometimes referred to as Gestural Abstraction and later it was subsumed into the broad movement of Abstract Expressionism, but it was The New Yorker art critic, Harold Rosenberg who coined the term Action Painting back in 1952.

One of the main principles of Abstract Expressionism (and the reason the term is controversial among art historians to this day) was the evasion of a collective style; each of the Action Artists painted in individual, signature styles. What did unite this collection of abstract painters was a fiery energy and movement that was visible on the canvas.

From spontaneous brushstrokes to splashing, spilling, or dripping paint, Action Painting celebrated painterly gestures that were clearly visible on the surface of the canvas. Labored brushstrokes were abandoned in favor of raw strokes that expressed the energy of their application to give the art a fresh immediacy. Rosenberg argued that painting had become an act, rather than an object, and a painting was no longer a picture, but “an event.”

And no artist expressed this in clearer terms than Jackson Pollock, who would come to define the raw, almost uncontrolled energy of Action Painting. Working with his canvas on the floor, Pollock dripped and poured his paint in rhythmic patterns as he energetically moved around the canvas in a way that tracked his movements. “On the floor I am more at ease,” he said. “I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” And while Pollock is most closely associated with Rosenberg’s principles, he was far from alone in his Abstract Expressionism.

The Artists

Five years before Rosenberg defined the energy of Action Painting, Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings – from 1947 to 1950 – opened the artistic door to bolder, gestural techniques in other artists. Bursting with modernity, his work left behind the convention of any pre-war ideology or style as he rejected influence in favor of redefining the categories of painting in modern art, creating works that were not only immediately identifiable as his, but frenetically original pieces that still demand attention today.

Similarly, the gestural brushstrokes of Franz Kline – made in house paint – might appear in line with those made by Pollock. However, whereas the work of Pollock was rooted in meaning, Kline’s art only referenced itself, as the brushstrokes were “unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence”.

Willem de Kooning – Woman as Landscape. Sold for $68,937,504 via Christie’s (November 2018) 

Kline started out as a figural painter, but his friend Willem de Kooning encouraged him to project his small-scale gestural paintings onto a wall, so the individual brushstrokes were enlarged and could be appreciated in their own right. Typified by raw materials, stroke, line, and color, Kline developed a distinct, physical style of Action Painting, but with the distinction that his compositions weren’t spontaneous, as instead they were planned and often sketched in detail on old phonebooks.

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It’s de Kooning who’s often credited as the originator of Action Painting, and it’s the vigorous brushstrokes of his Woman series (started in the early 1950s) that would successfully evolve the emotive and expressive style. Like Kline, de Kooning often reworked his canvases, which produced a purposeful sense of dynamic incompletion. This meant that it seemed his forms were still in the process of moving and thus exemplified Rosenberg’s definition of Action Painting as an event, rather than a traditional finished artwork.

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Other artists like Mark Rothko aren’t immediately obvious as the Action Painters described by Rosenberg. And while Rothko didn’t subscribe to any one school of thought or practice, he’s often associated with American Abstract Expressionism. Painter and critic (and Willem de Kooning’s wife) Elaine de Kooning declared him an American Action Painter in a provocative 1958 article.

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“What distinguished these Americans was the moral attitude which they shared toward their art; that is to say, they saw the content of their art as moral rather than aesthetic,” explained Elaine de Kooning. And if you look closely at his No.3 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the layers, strokes, and dribbles of paint are clearly visible in Rothko’s ethereal, intimate painting.

As a member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Joan Mitchell was a noted Action Painter and one of the most important post-war Abstract Expressionists. Her innovative painterly techniques evolved in rebellious fashion, as she developed swirling masses that vibrated with life at the center of her compositions. [The critic] “Clement Greenberg said there should never be a central image so I decided to make one,” Mitchell once said. Trees made regular appearances in her dripped and splashed oeuvre.

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Autumn Rhythm – Jackson Pollock (1950)

By the October of 1950, Jackson Pollock was at the height of his powers and his nonrepresentational Autumn Rhythm displays this through his thinned paint applied to un-primed, un-stretched canvases.

Splattered, splashed, dripped, and flung at the canvas, paint was applied with furious energy in a process that also used sticks, trowels, and knives to frenetically craft dense, lyrical compositions. There’s no central focal point, but unlike traditional works of art, it’s the process of laying the canvas flat on the floor and moving around it while applying paint that makes it an unmistakable Action Painting and unmistakably eye catching.

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Woman, I – Willem de Kooning (1952)

Acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1953, its “committee found the picture quite frightening, but felt that it had intense vitality and liked the quality of the color.” Featuring thick and thin paint, rough and smooth textures, de Kooning prepared huge quantities of paint for the Woman series of paintings, as he altered colors and textures for the near two years he spent on the composition, despite its appearance of being intuitively executed.

Unusually for an abstract painting, a woman is the central focus, despite abstract artists and critics declaring the human figure an obsolete subject. Some saw Woman, I as a regression towards outmoded traditions, but the sweeping brushstrokes and rough black outlines that incompletely distinguish her form from the surrounding vigorous strokes make it a master of abstraction.

La Garrigue – Jean Fautrier (1956)

This work can be viewed on the Musées de la Ville de Paris website.

Displaying the close relationship between the European Tachiste movement and Action Painting, Jean Fautrier’s La Garrigue incorporates the expressionistic and gestural aspects of Tachisme, but with a more polished edge. Its relation to Action Painting becomes clearer with the knowledge that the French word tache means spot or splash.

The action behind Fautrier’s piece is clear in the compact sweeps of green paint at the center of the work. Despite its allusion to landscape, the gestures are full of nervous energy, while La Garrigue’s sweeps of thick paint contributes a pessimistic tone that would be seen in Action Painting in the years after World War II.

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Mr. Stella – Kazuō Shiraga (1958)

A painKazuō Shiraga produced the renowned Mr. Stella with his feet. That’s right, with his feet. A remarkable accomplishment that was achieved by attaching a rope to the ceiling of his studio and suspending himself over the canvas on the floor, before sweeping his paint-covered feet over the canvas. How’s that for action!

Composed of dense reddish brown paint that’s inconsistently applied and doesn’t cover the canvas, Mr. Stella shares a more involved, physical way of painting familiar to Action Painting, while working with the canvas on the floor is obviously indebted to Jackson Pollock.

See it for yourself at Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, Japan.

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Wood, Wind, No Tuba – Joan Mitchell (1979)

Painting into the night while blasting Mozart from her French countryside home, Joan Mitchell’s mature era was defined by her abandoning preparatory sketches and approaching her edge-to-edge masterworks with a raw inspiration that required a significant degree of physical effort.

Art critic Clement Greenberg credited these mature works as one of Abstract Expressionism’s highest profile forbearers. Alongside her Untitled piece (above), Wood, Wind, No Tuba is a symphony of expression that wears its action on the canvas. Painting “is the opposite of death, it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live,” Mitchell once said.

Legacy Opening Doors

What started in 1945 with a frenetic energy thrust gestures to the centre of art, but as 1960 approached, its popular appeal eased, just as its influence opened the doors of artistic possibility. Painters like Francis Bacon and Cy Twombly stepped through and developed their own distinctive gestural styles.

Action Painters influence extended beyond the canvas too, as Performance Art took the painting out of Action Painting and gave it a new free-form canvas. Allan Kaprow’s Happenings took things one step further and entirely rejected the materials of painting and made art from its surroundings, and not the layers of paint used by Action Painters.

Action Painting’s legacy isn’t merely its influence. It isn’t its pioneering spirit that changed how people approach art, it’s not that it replaced an emphasis on the form, or that it put the action of a painting front and center. It’s all this and more, as the frenetic energy that flung and splattered painters like Pollock and de Kooning into the limelight remains as hypnotically appealing today as it was then, particularly at auction.

As one of the 20th century’s most renowned artists, Pollock’s art still excites, with his Number 31 selling at Christie’s for $54,205,000, while de Kooning’s Woman as Landscape went under the hammer for $68,937,500 at Christie’s in 2018, proving that gestures remain as important to life and art today, as they did when first realised by Harold Rosenberg in 1952.

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Sources: The Art Story | The Collector | MoMA | Tate | Britannica | Ideelart | Guggenheim | Joan Mitchell Foundation | Minnesota Museum of American Art | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Wikipedia | Art News 1 | Art News 2 | Jackson Pollock.org | Philips