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
Color Field Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Paul Jenkins and dozens of other painters found that pouring and staining opened the door to innovations and revolutionary methods of drawing and expressing meaning in new ways. The number of artists who stained in the 1960s greatly increased with the availability of acrylic paint. Staining acrylic paint into the fabric of cotton duck canvas was more benign and less damaging to the fabric of the canvas than the use of oil paint. In 1970 artist Helen Frankenthaler commented about her use of staining: "When I first started doing the stain paintings, I left large areas