Action Painting (also Actionpainting "action painting") refers to an art movement of modern painting within abstract expressionism. It appeared in the USA from 1950 and became internationally known through Jackson Pollock. European Tachisme or Informel is comparable.
The term goes back to the US art critic Harold Rosenberg, who in the 1950s called the painting of the American Abstract Expressionists Action Painting. More recent research suggests that the exile surrealist Wolfgang Paalen was the first to introduce the term. In his theory of observer-dependent possibility space, which, through his publications, gave abstract painting new momentum and a unified, new world view in New York in the 1940s, Paalen incorporated insights from quantum physics as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of the totemic view of the world and the spatial structures of Northwest Coast Indian painting.