Abstract Expressionism was the first major American art movement to gain international influence, emerging in New York in the 1940s as European artists fleeing fascism brought Surrealism's ideas about the unconscious into contact with the American scene. Jackson Pollock's drip paintings — created by walking around an enormous canvas on the floor, pouring and dripping — made gesture itself into the subject of painting: the act, not the representation. Mark Rothko's hovering colour rectangles aimed for a spiritual response; Willem de Kooning retained figural energy in explosive, fragmenting strokes. The movement had two broad tendencies: 'action painting' (Pollock, de Kooning) which emphasised the physical act, and 'colour field painting' (Rothko, Barnett Newman) which reduced painting to pure colour experience. Abstract Expressionism shifted the centre of the art world from Paris to New York for the first time in history.