Independent writer and curator Debra Bricker Balken discusses some of the ways in which Harold Rosenberg’s key essay “The American Action Painters” both galvanized and polarized mid-century American artists and critics. Her talk addresses Rosenberg’s fallout with writers such as Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer, as well as a new generation of formalist thinkers who emerged in the 1960s. Presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department.