Action painting
Although Pollock is closely associated with Action Painting because of his style, technique, and his painterly "touch" and his physical application of paint, art critics have likened Pollock to both Action painting and color field painting. Another critical view advanced by Greenberg connects Pollock's allover canvasses to the large-scale "Water Lilies" of Claude Monet done during the 1920s. Art critics such as Michael Fried, Greenberg and others have observed that the overall feeling in Pollock's most famous works – his "drip" paintings – read as vast fields of built-up linear elements. They note that these works often read as vast complexes of similarly-valued paint skeins and all-over fields of color and drawing, and are related to the mural-sized Monets which are similarly constructed of close-valued brushed and scumbled marks that also read as fields of color and drawing. Pollock's use of all-over composition lend a philosophical and a physical connection to the way the color field painters like Newman, Rothko and Still construct their unbroken and in Still's case broken surfaces. In several paintings that Pollock painted after his classic "drip" painting period of 1947–1950, he used the technique of staining fluid oil paint and house paint into raw canvas. During 1951 he produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings, and in 1952 he produced stain paintings using color. In his November 1952 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City Pollock showed "Number 12, 1952", a large, masterful stain painting that resembles a brightly colored stained landscape (with an overlay of broadly dripped dark paint); the painting was acquired from the exhibition by Nelson Rockefeller for his personal collection.