What Is Abstract Expressionism? Painting as an Event

The movement divides into two tendencies that look nothing alike. Action painting, or gesture painting, emphasises the physical act of making the work, so that the surface records movement, speed and force: Jackson Pollock's poured canvases, made on the floor with sticks and dried brushes, Willem de Kooning's violently reworked figures, and Franz Kline's enormous black strokes. Colour field painting does the opposite, removing incident and gesture to leave large areas of unbroken colour intended to be experienced as an encompassing presence: Mark Rothko's stacked rectangles of soft-edged colour, Barnett Newman's fields split by a vertical stripe he called a zip, and Clyfford Still's jagged interlocking planes. The critic Harold Rosenberg championed the first and described the canvas as an arena in which to act rather than a space to reproduce something, and Clement Greenberg championed the second, arguing that painting should concern itself with flatness and with what only painting can do.

Several currents converged in New York in the 1940s. European surrealists including Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Roberto Matta arrived as refugees from the war and brought automatism, the practice of drawing without conscious control to release unconscious material, which is directly visible in the early work of Pollock and others. Government employment through the Federal Art Project during the Depression had paid many of these painters a wage to make work, which built a community and a habit of large-scale production. Mexican muralists, particularly Siqueiros, taught several of them industrial techniques including spraying and pouring. Jungian ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious circulated widely, and Pollock was in Jungian analysis. And the war itself made the previous generation's subjects feel inadequate, which is the reason repeatedly given by the painters themselves for abandoning figuration: after 1945 a picture of something seemed to several of them a form of evasion.

The techniques were as much a break as the imagery, and each was noticed at the time:

• •Working on unstretched canvas on the floor, walking around and into the picture, which removed the easel's implied window and the single viewpoint
• •Pouring, dripping and flicking liquid household paint rather than applying artist's oil with a brush, which records the motion of the arm and the viscosity of the medium
• •Very large scale, so that a viewer standing close is surrounded rather than looking at an object, which Rothko insisted on and specified viewing distances for
• •Staining, in which thinned paint is soaked directly into raw canvas so the colour is in the fabric rather than on it, developed by Helen Frankenthaler in 1952 and taken up by others
• •All-over composition with no focal point and no hierarchy, so that no part of the surface is more important than another
• •Retaining evidence of process, including drips, scrapes, changes of mind and the edges where a stroke ran out

The standard account is heavily male and the corrections have been substantial. Lee Krasner, a rigorous painter working before she met Pollock, spent decades classified as his widow and has since had major retrospectives. Helen Frankenthaler's staining technique changed what followed more than most of the gestural work did. Joan Mitchell produced a body of work in France that is now regarded as among the strongest of the period. Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan and Alma Thomas each worked within or alongside the movement and were marginalised in different ways. Norman Lewis was a founding participant in the group's discussions and was systematically excluded from the commercial and critical attention his white colleagues received. The reassessment is not a matter of adding names to a list, since the inclusion of these painters changes the account of what the movement was doing, particularly on colour and on the relationship between abstraction and landscape.

One of the more uncomfortable facts about the period emerged from declassified documents and from interviews given in the 1990s. American intelligence agencies, through foundations that concealed the funding, promoted exhibitions of this work in Europe during the Cold War, on the reasoning that an art of individual freedom and spontaneity made a useful contrast with the state-mandated socialist realism of the Soviet bloc. The painters themselves were largely unaware, several were left-wing, and the work was genuinely unpopular with American politicians who regarded it as degenerate, which is part of why the promotion had to be covert. The episode does not make the paintings propaganda, and it does complicate the story of a purely aesthetic triumph. What is not in doubt is the effect on the art market and on the succeeding generations, since the scale, the emphasis on process, the field-like use of colour and the treatment of the work as an event rather than an image run directly into minimalism, performance, land art and a great deal of what followed.

The New York painters of the late 1940s and 1950s split into action painting, which records the physical gesture on canvases worked on the floor, and colour field painting, which removes incident to leave large enveloping areas of colour. It grew from surrealist automatism brought by refugees, from Depression-era public employment, from Mexican mural techniques and from a postwar sense that depicting things was inadequate. Women and Black painters central to it were long excluded from the account, and American intelligence agencies covertly promoted the work abroad.