Historical context

It is essential for the understanding of action painting to place it in historical context. A product of the post-World War II artistic resurgence of expressionism in The united states & more specifically New York City, action painting developed in an period where quantum mechanics & psychoanalysis were beginning to flourish & were changing people's perception of the physical & psychological world; & civilization�s understanding of the world through heightened self-consciousness & awareness.The earlier art of Kandinsky & Mondrian had freed itself from the portrayal of objects & in lieu tried to evoke, address & delineate, through the aesthetic sense, emotions & feelings within the viewer. Action painting took this a step further, using both Jung & Freud�s ideas of the unconscious as its underlying foundations. The paintings of the Action painters were not meant to report objects per se or even specific emotions. In lieu they were meant to touch the observer deep in the unconscious mind, evoking a sense of the primeval & tapping the collective sense of an archetypal visual language. This was done by the artist painting "unconsciously," & spontaneously, making a powerful arena of raw emotion & action, in the moment. Action painting was clearly influenced by the surrealist emphasis on automatism which (also) influenced by psychoanalysis claimed a more direct access to the unconscious mind. Important exponents of this idea of art making were the painters Joan Miró & André Masson. However the action painters took everything the surrealists had done a step further.