THE AMERICAN ACTION PAINTERS

The American Action Painters.  H. Rosenberg.  1952. 

This is a personal summary of H Rosenberg’s ‘The American Action Painters’, an essay which was published in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22; then published in Tradition of the New, Horizon Press, 1959.  ‘The American Action Painters’ can be read online at, for example: www.artnews.com/2007/11/01/top-ten-artnews-stories-not-a-picture-but-an-event/

The American Action Painters

Individualistic American painters

Any definition of a movement in modern art is limited in its effectiveness because the most profound artists that the definition seeks to define always evade the definition; and yet definition is needed in order to denote something essential in these most profound artists.

There has been a profusion of 20^th Century styles of painting in the USA in the post World War Two era.  When we explore this phenomenon, asking whether this is the USA emulating European art, or whether something new is being created, definitions are necessary.

The borrowing of compositional elements and styles from, amongst others, Kandinsky, Miro and Cezanne (‘The School of Paris’) may be seen in many of the works of American painters in the post World War Two era.  These American works are in the nature of studies for the benefit of the painter but they do not indicate the future.

But some American painters do have ‘a consciousness of a function for painting that is different from that of the earlier “abstractionists”’: these are individualistic painters who do not belong to a School. 

The canvas as an arena

Particular individual painters have come to understand the canvas as an ‘arena in which to act’, rather than as a place to paint a picture: there is no longer an image in the painter’s mind when he comes to apply paint to canvas; the outcome of the artist’s encounter with the canvas is always a surprise.

One or more sketch may be made in advance of an encounter with the canvas.  This does not invalidate the work on the canvas.  The continuity of a number of encounters may be a ‘prolonging of the act’.

In this approach to painting there is a ‘special motive for extinguishing the object’: this approach is not the same as Abstract, Expressionist or Abstract Expressionist art; this approach is one in which nothing is allowed to intrude into the act of painting. 

The outcome – the work of art – will have an effect on the viewer that will be ‘a tension’.  

A painting that is an act breaks down the distinction between art and life

A painting that is an ‘act of painting’ is an integral part of the life story of its artist.  Anything in human existence is therefore relevant to the painting except art criticism.  The critic is a stranger to the ‘act of painting’: any criterion that a critic may apply is inappropriate.

Some painters who are engaged in ‘act of painting’ seek the critics’ approval and thus invalidate their work.  The value of a painting that is an ‘act of painting’ must be found outside art.

It is the inner life of the artist that brings any relation of a painting that is an ‘act of painting’ into relationship with art history, but the resulting work transcends these relationships. 

It is ‘role’ that gives meaning to a painting that is an ‘act of painting’: the way in which the artist ‘organises his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation’.  The painter becomes an actor: he must ‘become a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked’. 

The new movement in art is essentially religious but on secular terms

Most of the artists to which this description applies are not young, but are ‘re-born’ through the events of a ‘grand crisis’.  The decision ‘just to paint’ liberates the artist.

Americans are reluctant to talk about the impact of world affairs upon their own emotions: there is no evidence that ‘painting as an act of painting’ is a response to ‘the war and the decline of radicalism in America’.  Even so, individualistic painters in the past ten years have been affected by the need to abandon or destroy their current work: they have wanted their canvas to become a new world so that past inheritance and future possibility could both be rejected.  This has taken place within a mood of optimism: America is the land of the pioneer and the immigrant; there is weariness at the burden of past history but there is also exhilaration at the new adventure.  Every move on the canvas would now be an opportunity to reveal the true nature of the artist and his art.

This new movement in art is therefore essentially religious, because there has been a conversion, but this has been on secular terms: private myths have been created.  Each act on a canvas is a re-creation of the moment when the artist was first liberated.

The artist lives with constant possibility: the artist’s reality only exists in the process of creating.  The motto is “Except the soul has divested itself of the love of created things”.   There is the constant risk that the artist’s possibility lacks any reality: the artist must constantly deny that this is the case.   Aspects of mysticism and philosophy come to the fore.  American painters do not readily philosophise: they simply paint.  And there is currently no effective language to talk about painting in which the act of painting is itself the art.

The ‘new painters’ exist in a spectrum between, at one extreme, ‘Whitman’s Open Road of Risk’ and at the other extreme the ‘Weak Mysticism of Christian Science’.  The former pursues ‘the ineffable in all behaviour’, so that the work on the canvas shows itself as a work of complete commitment by the artist, to the extent even that the canvas itself may have responded to the artist as he works, and in so doing has stimulated the artist in an exhausting encounter.  The latter ‘tends towards easy painting’ and ‘unearned masterpieces’: the artist lives by luck and self-satisfying gestures on the canvas; the outcome is ‘apocalyptic wallpaper’.  There is megalomania in the artist who lives and acts for sensation but who has little more to offer than a ‘unique signature’ or a ‘single stroke’.  When the challenge of ‘a real act’ is avoided by the artist then the artist’s process of transformation has ended.  When this happens the artist ceases to have presence as an artist: he has become a commodity. 

Modern Art is not a style

‘The new painting’ needs a new kind of criticism.  Unfortunately, Modern Art arrived in the USA at the same time that the Modern also arrived in many genres and fields of design and product.  This symbiosis generated aspects of relationship between Modern art and the rest of the Modern world that have the characteristics of hierarchy and preference.  But Modern Art confounds this because Modern Art is not a style: Modern Art is that which authoritative voices (‘social power and pedagogy’) have identified as being culturally relevant to the present epoch; it is a ‘revolution of taste’ which identifies those people who are at the forefront of the revolution.  Responses to Modern Art are therefore primarily responses to those who are responsible for the revolution, and this leads to attacks against it by a wide range of vested interests in society.  Indifference is therefore characteristically shown to the work of the ‘vanguard painter’, although public appetite for the Modern has tended to comodify ‘today’s advanced paintings’ but with no understanding of them.