drip painting

noun

1. a technique of abstract painting exemplified chiefly in the later works of Jackson Pollack and marked by the intricately executed dripping and pouring of the paint on a canvas placed on the floor.

Word History and Origins

Origin of drip painting¹

First recorded in 1955–60

Example Sentences

The land theme is so loose and shaggy that, without the contemporary time frame, the show could start with prehistoric cave paintings, toss in a Chinese Song Dynasty scroll whose pictures follow a journey down the Yangzi River, add a Central African Kongo spirit sculpture filled with grave dirt and, for good measure, suitably hang a Jackson Pollock drip painting solely because it was made by spreading raw canvas flat on the ground.

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When Richard Serra died yesterday, I flashed back nearly 30 years to a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking with him and with his wife, the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, at Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting from 1950, “Autumn Rhythm.”

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The first room houses some of the museum’s greatest knockout treasures, such as the 1949 Jackson Pollock drip painting “Number 1” and Robert Rauschenberg’s 1957 “Factum I” and “Factum II,” the almost-but-not-quite matched set of nearly identical, collaged Expressionist canvases.

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But it is one of the best, in a medium that consistently gets art dead wrong, too often forsaking patience for the moviemaking shorthand of showing the flash of genius as, say, Jackson Pollock discovering drip painting literally overnight, in one alcohol-and-insomnia-fueled burst of discovery.

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The moisture is slowly evaporating from the beads as the show continues, leaving intertwined bits of shifting sediment behind — a river-made Pollock drip painting, as it were.

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