‘A homage paid by the Guggenheim Foundation to Rimini and to the Mee-ting. In this way it has been possible to fulfill the necessary task – within the Meeting entitled “America Americhe”–, to give voice to the greatest post-war pictorial expression of North America. Creating, making an action, as well as the dynamics of the action itself, generating movement and life, are characteristic elements of American reality and are presented to us in the works of Action Painting. The advent of Action Painting and the lives of its exponents around the Fifties bring us to the moment when art most strongly asked itself about the meaning of this frantic dynamism. What is the meaning of art when each event is quickly consumed and suddenly overtaken by a more recent novelty, by an even more radical change, which anyway does not seem to shake the perfect and opulent image of American society? Who is the artist and what is the meaning of his action? The radicality of these questions triggered the rebellion which, for about ten years, found its expression in the American Action Painting and which influenced the most significant European artistic movements. The way of making art and the identity of the artist then became the subjects of an issue which directly regards the existential problem. The artist, as a prototype of man, “the last spiritual being” (A.Gorky), risks all of himself in that action which represents life, that is art. The artist looks for the motivations of his actions in the paintings, which represent unrepeatable ‘events’. He accepts feeling totally lost. He sets off on a journey knowing the path towards the horizon only at the end of the action, “when there is nothing else to add ” to the canvas. The encounter with the work of Action Painting, so essential to approach any other artistic expression that followed, witnesses the period during which contemporary art has most intensely been able to tell about man and his condition. The Meeting will show works by William Baziotes, Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning, Robert Mo-therwell, Kenzo Okada, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Mark To-bey. The film “Jackson Pollock” which belongs to the Museum At Large in New York, will also be shown: it describes Pollock’s painting technique – the so called ‘drip-ping’ – which represents his most significant contribution to 20th century art.’