Action painting is the gestural strain of abstract expressionism in which the act of painting itself — drips, splashes, sweeping arm movements — becomes the subject.
The term 'action painting' was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in his 1952 essay 'The American Action Painters', published in 'ARTnews'. Rosenberg argued that for a new generation of American painters — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others — the canvas had become 'an arena in which to act', a space for the existential drama of the painter's gesture rather than a surface to be illustrated. Pollock's drip paintings of 1947–1950, made by laying canvas on the floor and pouring, dripping, and flinging enamel paint from sticks and stiffened brushes, were the movement's most radical statement. De Kooning's slashing brushwork in his 'Woman' series (1950–1953) brought figuration back into action painting on its own terms. Franz Kline's vast black-and-white compositions of the early 1950s reduced the gesture to its most economical force. The label 'action painting' became closely associated with Abstract Expressionism, although the Color Field painters were normally excluded. The movement made New York the centre of post-war Western art and made the American painter, briefly, a heroic existential figure.