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Action painting |
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Often known as “gestural abstraction”, the painting technique of Action painting involves the spontaneous smearing, splashing and dribbling of paints on the canvas. Action painting features the emphasis of the final result on the act of painting as an important characteristic of the completed work.
The technique of Action painting, which was quite popular during the 1940s and 1960s, is linked directly with the art movement of abstract expressionism. Action painting in America is often compared with the French technique of abstract painting - the French tachisme.
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In 1952 the term of Action painting, which was attributed to it by Harold Rosenberg, an American critic, indicated a significant change in the artistic viewpoint of the critics and painters of the New York School. Rosenberg considered the canvas to be “an arena in which to act”. The famous abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock had been candid since long in viewing painting as a field within which the acts of creation and former critics including Clement Greenberg, paid attention to the “objectness” of their works. According to him, the physical presence of the clogged and painted faces of the paintings lets them perceived as records of the struggle for existence by the artists. Analysis of Rosenberg switched the prominence from the painting to the struggle of the artist and comprehended the completed work as solely the physical expression, some sort of a leftover of the real action which was involved in creating the painting. This act of giving a new meaning to art by Rosenberg influenced the world of art over the following two decades and became the basis on which various other important art movements including Happenings, Fluxus, Earth Art and Conceptual were initiated. A study from the Aesthetic Realism Foundation of “Number One 1948”, a painting of Pollock, it is shown by Lore Mariano how the artistic consequence of this typical demonstration of Action painting has been raised by its accuracy as it blends together the extremely opposites struggling within the artist as well as within any person.
Action painting emerged as a form of art in the backdrop of the artistic uprising during the post-war period. It developed during a period when psychoanalysis and quantum mechanics started to evolve and alter the way human beings look down to self-consciousness and the world.
The former techniques of painting used by Mondrian and Kandinsky had tried to separate painting from being the interpretation of objects and attempted to tempt the viewer’s emotions. “Action Art” further improved this by utilizing the views of Freud on subconscious. The Action Artists unconsciously put emphasis on touching the subconscious of the viewers and this unconscious activity was the painter’s “action”. A painter lets the paint dribble onto a canvas and lets it fall at the will of his subconscious mind and express his psyche. One of the best examples of Action painting is the use of the cigarette stubs in the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Other famous action painters whose are quite noteworthy include Norman Bluhm, Frank Kline, Sam Francis, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Jack Tworkov and Milton Resnick.
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