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The concept of action forcefully entered visual-arts commentary when Harold Rosenberg articulated it in his celebrated essay from 1952, “The American Action Painters.” “At a certain moment,” he wrote, “the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. . . . His act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.” Rosenberg drew his image from his impression of American Abstract Expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, but comparable diction was also used in Europe, where terms such as Art Informel [more], Art Autre, and Tachisme were used to discuss works by Hans Hartung, Matta, and Wols, among others. The theories behind these terms also identified the gesture—or act—of painting as the most significant aspect of the painter’s process. Such postwar thoughts were drawn from several prewar sources. The emphasis on gesture as a self-mirroring process was derived from Surrealist doctrine, in which “pure psychic automatism” was thought to free the artist from stylistic convention and rationalist construction. In the process of automatist drawing, the artist would, in André Breton’s phrase, heed “thought’s dictation” without mental preconceptions and interference, and, ideally, in full freedom. The issue of freedom loomed large after the cataclysm of World War II, and action was fused with ethical and philosophical concerns. The notion that an individual can be defined by his or her acts was implicit in existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre declared that “a man is not other than a series of undertakings.” Other philosophers stressed the “lived” experience in aesthetics, as opposed to theoretical doctrine. In the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl and the writings of John Dewey and William James, the concept of the lived experience was applied to a dynamic aesthetic in which the whole being of the viewer is in action as a work of art is contemplated. DORE ASHTON
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See Willem de Kooning,
Composition
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