Harold Rosenberg

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Harold Rosenberg (February 2, 1906, New York City - July 11, 1978, New York City) was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. The term was first employed in Rosenberg's essay "American Action Painters" published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews. The essay was reprinted in Rosenberg's book The Tradition of the New in 1959. The title is itself ambiguous as it both refers to American Action Painters and American Action Painters and reveals Rosenberg's political agenda which consisted in crediting US as the center of international culture and "Action Painting" as the most advanced of its cultural forms. This theme was already developed in a previous article "The Fall of Paris" published in Partisan Review in 1940.