With the start of World War 2, artists and intellectuals in Europe started to migrate to the United States and New York gained its status as the art capital of the decade. The artists brought their unique view of life to the New York art scene and with the interchange of ideas, in the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism also known as New York School emerged. As a part of that movement, action painting developed by Pollock and Krasner prioritized physical act of painting rather than the outcome of the action. In order to create forms using free associations, automatism was used as a tool. To materialize the unconscious, conscious control of creative action was eliminated from the process.
