David Sylvester interviews five American Abstract Expressionists
3: Philip Guston
The movement in painting which emerged in New York during the 1940s and is known as Abstract Expressionism or as Action Painting has probably been the most influential movement in post-war art, and is certainly the first movement in the history of American art to have had wide international repercussions. In these interviews (recently recorded in New York) with some of the movement's leading figures, the most dominant single idea is that, in painting spontaneously towards the realisation of an unforeseen pictorial order, the painter is discovering his own identity.