Travel Pick: Art and Archaeology in United States
Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976

In Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, over fifty key works by 32 artists – among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko – are viewed from the perspectives of influential, rival art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the artists, and popular culture.

Context rooms in the exhibition feature documents – including personal correspondence, magazines and newspapers, film and television clips, and photographs – that shed light on the cultural and social climate of the 1940s to the 1970s. The works in the exhibition, arranged in thematic sections, are grouped to evoke the rivalry of Rosenberg (he promoted action – his idea of the creative, physical act of making art) and Greenberg’s (belief in abstraction and the formal purity of the art object).