Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic, or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock 's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The newer research tends to put the exile - surrealist Wolfgang Paalen in the position of the artist and theoretician who fostered the theory of the viewer - dependent possibility space through his paintings and his magazine DYN. Paalen considered ideas of quantum mechanics, as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of the totemic vision and the spatial structure of native - Indian painting from British Columbia and prepared the ground for the new spatial vision of the young American abstracts. His long essay Totem Art (1943) had considerable influence on such artists as Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Around 1944 Barnett Newman tried to explain America 's newest art movement and included a list of "the men in the new movement. '' Paalen is mentioned twice; other artists mentioned are Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Hofmann, Baziotes, Gorky and others. Motherwell is mentioned with a question mark. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his "white writing '' canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all - over '' look of Pollock 's drip paintings.
who started the drip technique in art during abstract expressionism in the modern period
André Masson Max Ernst David Alfaro Siqueiros