Harold Rosenberg is remembered as one of the most incisive and supportive critics of Abstract Expressionism. His famous 1952 essay, 'The American Action Painters,' likened artists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline to heroic existentialists wrestling with self-expression. And his stress on the expressive and thematic content of their art ultimately made his writing more popular - at least in the 1950s - than the formalist criticism of his rival, Clement Greenberg. Originally a contributor to fringe, leftist magazines such as Partisan Review, Rosenberg went on to the influential post of art critic for the New Yorker. His reading of gestural abstraction as "action painting" also proved important for early promoters of Happenings, and performance art, such as Allan Kaprow.

• Harold Rosenberg was the most influential critic and supporter of the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s. His description of them as 'action painters,' and his stress on their dramatic and personal confrontation with the canvas, provided a compelling image of their creative process, and one that also proved popular with the artists themselves. He believed that the action painters worked almost without regard for conventional standards of beauty: their achievement was an authentic expression of the artist's individuality and humanity.
• Rosenberg saw Abstract Expressionism as a major rupture with the history of modern art. As he put it, "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act... What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." Rather than strive to produce a perfect finished picture, Rosenberg believed the new American painters threw all their energies into the charged moment of creation - what was registered on the canvas was merely a record of that moment.
• Even though Rosenberg's proclaimed that, with the advent of the New York School, Paris had been eclipsed as the fount of new art, his writing was strongly marked by the Existentialist philosophy that was actually prominent in Paris at the time.
• Although Rosenberg was the dominant New York critic in the 1950s, he lost out to Greenberg in the following decade, when the artists he championed, such as de Kooning, began to be sidelined in favor of color field painting.

Born Abraham Benjamin Rosenberg, Rosenberg spent his childhood in Brooklyn, NY. For a brief time, he attended classes at City College (1923-24) before enrolling in St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY) from where he would graduate in 1927 with a law degree. Shortly thereafter, he contracted osteomyelitis, a bone infection that would force him to walk with the assistance of a cane for the rest of his life, and which also kept him from military service during World War II.

Not long after law school, Rosenberg became a New York bohemian - studying the writing and philosophy of Karl Marx, writing poetry, and also publishing in Partisan Review. He would later recall this early period by saying that he was "educated on the steps of the New York Public Library."

During the Depression, Rosenberg found work writing about the arts for the government-supported Works Progress Administration (WPA). It was during this time that he first met Willem de Kooning, with whom he often discussed abstract art. His encounter and ensuing friendship with de Kooning was a major turning point in his life and career.

Through the WPA, Rosenberg was able to keep working almost constantly, even though many of his writings ended up being censured by the WPA early on. In 1938, he moved to Washington, D.C. to assume the arts editorship for the WPA American Guides, a series of books and pamphlets funded by the Federal Writers' Project, which were designed to supply travel guides to all 48 states, as well as various cities.

The first major piece of writing to lend Rosenberg any notoriety was his 1940 essay 'The Fall of Paris.' Originally published in The Partisan Review, it announced the demise of Paris as the leading center of experiment and innovation in modern art, and claimed that New York had moved into its place.

As World War II continued, Rosenberg published a book of his poetry in 1943 entitled Trance Above the Streets. At this time he was also working for the Office of War Information and the War Advertising Council.

In the late 1940s, Rosenberg, along with Robert Motherwell, Pierre Chareau and John Cage, edited and released the one and only issue of their journal Possibilities, which promoted many of the abstract artists known throughout Greenwich Village (such as Barnett Newman, Motherwell and Willem de Kooning) and the bohemian getaway of East Hampton, NY.

It was in 1952 that Rosenberg really gained the art community's attention with the publication of 'American Action Painters' in the magazine Art News. The piece, which introduced the term 'action painting' to the American public, is still recognized as a seminal work.

In 1959, Rosenberg's first collection of essays was published as The Tradition of the New, for which Willem de Kooning provided the cover art. In a sense, Tradition was Rosenberg's manifesto on modern art. The title of the book, along with the term 'action painting,' quickly became part of the popular vocabulary of art.

The publication of The Tradition of the New garnered several awards for Rosenberg, and made the academic world take notice of him. After working as a lecturer on behalf of Princeton University and Southern Illinois University, Rosenberg was offered the position of Professor of Art at the University of Chicago in 1966. Despite his dislike for the convergence of modern art and academia - what he perceived as an old world's (the university) attempts to grasp and theorize the new (modern art) - Rosenberg accepted the position.

Rosenberg also ascended further in the world of journalism. He began writing for The New Yorker in 1962, and in 1967, the magazine made him their resident art critic.

In 1973 Rosenberg resigned from his post on the Advertising Council (formerly the War Advertising Council) after nearly thirty years of being on the U.S. government's payroll.

Between 1969 and 1975 he published five different essay collections, with titles such as Artworks and Packages, Act and the Actor, and Discovering the Present. There are also various collections of his writings which were compiled posthumously.

In 1978, shortly before his death, he completed a book-length study of the artist Barnett Newman, and helped curate a show at The Whitney Museum of American Art looking at the work of his friend and colleague on The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg.

Rosenberg continued writing for The New Yorker throughout the '60s and '70s. In 1978, he suffered a stroke and contracted pneumonia, which resulted in his death in his Long Island home that same year.

Above all, Rosenberg's legacy is his creation of the term 'action painting.' No other label was so widely embraced in the 1950s as a description of the style and attitudes of gestural painters such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. With it he instilled the idea that, in Abstract Expressionist painting, the marks on the surface of the canvas are a record of immediate experience.



Harold Rosenberg viewed modern art in the 20th century as a giant laboratory where experiments took place, and like any good experiment, there must be trial and error. Action painting as he saw it was a prime example of such experiment, since it was premised more on spontaneous, felt expression than on coldly preconceived designs. The experiment of abstract art was an occasion for spontaneous action. In this laboratory, Rosenberg proffers that "The painter was no longer concerned with producing a certain kind of object, the work of art, but with living on the canvas." This perspective, from his essay "The American Action Painters," marked a major turning point in how the art world viewed modern painting. Rosenberg's theory challenged Clement Greenberg's belief that contemporary American art had evolved out of European modernism in a constant process of renewal.

Rosenberg was first introduced to theories of abstract art upon meeting Willem de Kooning. At first, he struggled with them because they ran counter to his Marxism, which advocated that art should put in the service of society. But his friendship with de Kooning led to a change in his thinking.

He continued to believe that art and society were interlinked, but he began to view art as a way of countering the values he deplored in wider society. And as he absorbed the Existentialism of writers such as John-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, he came to an understanding of abstract art as a an urgent means to assert the authentic self, to express individual identity, in the face of the anonymity of the modern world.

Indeed Rosenberg eventually grounded his support for 'action painting' in his belief that it represented a way of confronting what he saw as a crisis in culture, society, and politics. Unlike his rival, Clement Greenberg, who believed artists needed to turn away from this crisis in order to preserve the values inherent in high art, Rosenberg argued that it was necessary to confront the crisis.

One of Rosenberg's most famous early essays, 'The Fall of Paris,' (1940) argued that with the arrival of World War II, Paris's role as the 'laboratory of the twentieth century' had ended, and the job of cultural leadership had passed to New York. While the observation would later be proved true - to the extent that New York came to dominate post-war art - his opinion was typical of the chauvinism that infected many American critics at this time, and Rosenberg later modified his attitude. In a 1963 New Yorker review, subtitled 'International Art and the New Globalism,' he wrote: "The early-twentieth-century internationalism in art has been dead for thirty years - since the ending of the Paris art movements and the closing down of its capital by the Depression, the War, and the Occupation. It has been superseded by a global art whose essence is precisely the absence of qualities attached to any geographical center. In the present globalism, there is no opening for a 'new Paris.'"

Rosenberg's essay 'American Action Painters' (originally published in Art News in 1952, then republished in his essay collection The Tradition of the New in 1959) introduced a new theory on how and why abstract artists made their art. The title 'Action Painting' was used in place of the less-favored 'Abstract Expressionism,' which he derided because he believed what was being expressed on the canvas wasn't exactly abstract, but something deeply personal and familiar. Rosenberg's label became a favored alternative to 'Abstract Expressionism,' most likely due to the fact that it made modern art feel more accessible to the public. 'Action painting' was far more descriptive and gave the viewer a clearer idea of what the artist was doing.

Interestingly enough, Rosenberg makes no mention of specific artists to whom the term 'action painting' would apply (in fact, it's still debated to this day whether Pollock or de Kooning was the inspiration for the term). The essay and its title were designed to emphasize the art world's need to look at each action painting as an individual event. De Kooning's Woman series or Pollock's drip paintings, for example, are not depicting specific images or scenes from the artists' minds, but rather the events of their consciousness. Just as the reader of a novel develops a relationship with the characters within, the action painters have a similar relationship with the canvas on which they paint, and if this is true, then the viewer will develop a relationship with the canvas as well.

The Action in 'action painting' refers to the artist's relationship with his or her canvas. The artist is not conveying an image or picture of the world, but striving for the most authentic expression of their individuality and humanity: this, as Rosenberg put it, "is not a picture but an event." It also suggests a new way to look at pictures: rather than meaning arising from the way the artist has carefully arranged the forms and figures, Rosenberg suggests we should think about the flurry of activity that produced those forms, and the artist's state of mind when he went to work.

While he held several professorships and college lecturing posts throughout his later career, Rosenberg was generally distrustful of academia. He saw great value in the study of art history since it could help inform artists and art lovers alike about where great art comes from; but he believed the relationship should end there.

According to Rosenberg, the academy's attempt to define art, particularly abstract art, was in itself a crime, because it sought to pigeonhole artistic achievements into specific contexts - be they social, political, psychological, geographic or otherwise. Rosenberg believed these attempts undermined the individual achievements of the artists, who in all likelihood had no grand political or social aspirations, but just wanted to paint something profound.

Unlike his key critical rival, Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg was not supportive of some of the developments in painting in the late 1950s and 1960s, namely those associated with color field and hard-edge painting, such as the work of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. Rosenberg viewed these artists' work as simply trying to capitalize on earlier modes of abstraction; worse, he believed them to be taking an academic approach to more important work of predecessors like de Kooning, Pollock and Rothko.

Although the roots of Existentialism can be traced back to the 17th century, it became a particularly voguish movement in the 1940s and 1950s. Essentially the philosophy insists on the importance of personal, individual experience. It prizes human experience and all its profundities, and sees it as constantly at odds with an otherwise absurd and meaningless world; the course of one's life is completely dictated by individual choices, and there are no invisible outside forces which determine the course of events. It also supposes that nothing in the world of mankind can be viewed objectively.

Rosenberg's understandings of Abstract Expressionism were closely tied to these ideas. When de Kooning or Pollock approached a canvas, he saw them as entering an encounter with the canvas; and the marks they left on the canvas were the traces of that supremely personal encounter. There is an existential drama occurring for such artists, because the style of action painting reveals the very process of painting (drips, heavy brush strokes), and this process is synonymous with the painter's personality. According to Rosenberg, the act of creating these paintings is an existential exercise, a brutally honest form of self-expression.

The art critic Jed Perl has written of Rosenberg: "Out of his powerful body emerged an endless stream of words. Rosenberg began his essays with grand assertions and aimed to keep them so much to the fast-talking, big-thinking level that the reader, gulping for air and a little relief, may have felt assaulted by an almost scattershot intellectual grandeur."

Rosenberg was an emotional writer, yet his style is philosophical without becoming too academic or bogged down by theoretical meandering. With each essay or review he wrote, Rosenberg's aim wasn't so much to draw conclusions about art, but to raise questions about the importance of art and its history.


Below are Rosenberg's main influencers, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.


"No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating"

"Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself."

"Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation."

"American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe."