writer, educator, philosopher and art critic
. He coined the term Action Painting
in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism
. The term was first employed in Rosenberg's essay "American Action Painters" published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews. The essay was reprinted in Rosenberg's book The Tradition of the New in 1959. The title is itself ambiguous as it both refers to American Action Painters and American Action Painters and reveals Rosenberg's political agenda which consisted in crediting US as the center of international culture after World War II and action painting
as the most relevant of its cultural forms. This theme was already developed in a previous article "The Fall of Paris" published in Partisan Review
in 1940.
Rosenberg was born in Brooklyn
, educated at City College of New York and received a law degree from St.
As with other modern artists, his readings provided not an organized outlook but a kind of metaphysical hum that surrounded his mental operations.
Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism|determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.
The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art but to release himself from it, in order to replace it with his own history. However the historical pattern is drawn, it will not fit the developing sensibility of the individual.
Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.
Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.
The internationalization of art becomes a factor contributing to the estrangement of art from the artist. The sum of works of all times and places stands against him as an entity with objectives and values of its own. In turn, since becoming aware of the organized body of artworks as the obstacle to his own aesthetic self-affirmation, the artist is pushed toward anti-intellectualism and willful dismissal of the art of the past.
Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Pablo Picasso|Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani|Modigliani, is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.