Abstract expressionism in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky. 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
Brushstrokes well as spatterings of paint are presented. Lichtenstein selected this source because he "...liked the summary rendering of the hand holding the brush and the way in which the cartoonist indicated paint". The three strokes in the upper right are the dominant imagery, while the partial view of the hand in the lower left limited by the edges of the canvas shows paint dripping from the brush. This is an example of Lichtenstein humorously presenting a subject that might be crowded out in a newspaper via a parody that relies on the difference between art and the rest of the