Harald Rosenberg

'Introduction to Six American Artists,'
 Possibilities, no. 1, Winter 1947-48, p. 75.

reprinted in 'The World Of Art Library • General'
Maurice Tuchman, 'The New York School, Abstract Expressionism in the 40s and 50s'
© Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
ISBN 0-500-18112-8 - clothbound
ISBN 0-500-20106-4 - paperbound

Attached neither to a community nor to one another, these painters experience a unique loneliness of a depth that is reached perhaps nowhere else in the world.
From the four corners of their vast land they have come to plunge themselves into the anonymity of New York, annihilation of their past being not the least compelling project of these esthetic Legionnaires. Is not the definition of true loneliness, that one is lonely not only in relation to people but in relation to things as well? Estrangement from American objects here reaches the level of pathos. It accounts for certain harsh tonalities, spareness of composition, aggressiveness of statement.

'The American Action Painters,' in
'The Tradition of the New', New York, Horizon Press,
1959, pp. 25, 26-28;
originally published in Art News, vol. 51, no. 8, December 1952, pp. 22-23, 48-50.

reprinted in 'The World Of Art Library • General'
Maurice Tuchman, 'The New York School, Abstract Expressionism in the 40s and 50s'
© Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
ISBN 0-500-18112-8 - clothbound
ISBN 0-500-20106-4 - paperbound


At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act rather as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.
Call this painting 'abstract' or 'expressionist' or 'abstract expressionist,' what counts is its special motive for extinguishing the object, which is not the same as in other abstract or expressionist phases of modern art.

The new American painting is not 'pure' art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the esthetic. The apples weren't brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting. In this gesturing with materials the esthetic, too, had been subordinated. Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which - or practically all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvases can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act. It is to be taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever be or be not in it, will be a tension.

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a 'moment' in the adulterated mixture of his life whether 'moment' means the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas on the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist's existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.