Action Painting

Experience the spontaneity and pure optical pleasure of paint dripped, flung, stroked, and slashed across large canvases by nine masters of gestural technique. Inspired by Freudian psychology and the actual process of creating art, Action Painting helped birth Abstract Expressionism and dominated progressive American painting well into the 1960s. As an enthusiastic collector, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. purchased many of these works directly from artists he befriended. This exhibition, drawn from our own vast storage vaults, complements his purchases of works by better-known contemporaries— Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline—which are regularly on display in our McKinnon Galleries of Modern Art.