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Action painting is a direct, instinctive, and especially dynamic branch of art that consists of the spontaneous technique of rapid, long brushstrokes and the by-chance effects of dripping and/or spilling paint around the art. The term was first called by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in his attempt to label the work by a group of American Abstract Expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism) who had used the method since about 1950. Action painting is separate from the intricately preconceived work of the “abstract imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which constitutes the other important direction found in Abstract Expressionism and compares to Action painting only in the same total devotion to unrestricted personal expression free of any traditional aesthetic and/or social values.

The paintings of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov portray the importance of the “automatic” techniques that came about in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s by the Surrealists. While Surrealist automatism (q.v.), which consisted of scribblings performed without the artist’s conscious design, was first and foremost designed to reveal unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic concept of the Action painters was fundamentally conceived as a process to give the artist’s instinctive creative forces freedom and of showing these forces directly to the viewer. In Action painting, the very act of painting being the purity of the artist’s personal connection with his artwork, was as remarkable as the completed work.

It is widely understood that Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings, created from 1947, began the new era of the bolder, gestural techniques that characterized Action painting. The intense brushstrokes of de Kooning’s “Woman” series, started in the early 1950s, successfully transgressed a fully emotive, expressive style. Action painting had major influence in the 1950s in Abstract Expressionism, with the most fundamental art movement happening in the United States. By the sixties, however, leadership of the movement had passed to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters, whose followers in the 60s rebelled against the irrational styles of the Action painters.

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