Action Painters.

The abstract expressionists — also called "Action Painters" because their blobs, drips, whorls, and scribbles express the process of painting, which they considered the essence of art — were too abstract for untutored American art lovers in the 1950s. The major young American artists of the day were redefining art and revolutionizing the aesthetic principles on which it was based, the public be damned. Such painters as Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko drew their inspiration from the Western European movements cubism and surrealism, from the publicly sponsored artists' programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, and from an unrelentingly threatening world political situation. The result was the first distinctly American art movement to have international influence.

Background.

With the upheaval of Western Europe during the 1930s and the military threat...