ABSTRACT
The early wave of the second generation inherited from the first a new territory in art open for colonization. According to Harold Rosenberg, the action painter confronted his canvas without preconceptions, and in the process of adding “right” gesture to gesture arrived at an image of his individual identity. Painting was conceived of as a continual struggle for self-definition in pursuit of self-transformation. Yet de Kooning and gesture painters on the whole had reservations about Rosenberg’s conception of action painting. An artist’s immersion in the unpremeditated process of painting, responding at once to the flow of consciousness and to the immediacies of painting, would yield a picture different from that based on preconception, a picture more likely to express feeling honestly. The difficulty in making and responding to fifties gesture painting prevented the best of it from deteriorating into parody or the merely pretty, decorative, or artificial.
