The Surrealist technique Automatism again unlocked possibilities for incorporating immediacy with a vivid record of manual activity, and the impulses behind it, into the final work. Automatism had supposedly allowed Surrealists like Miro and Masson to paint without full conscious control and so essentially stimulated the discovery of unorthodox forms.
In contrast abstract Expressionism elevated Automatist procedure into a means of reorganising the entire compostion. Hofmann was among the first to pour and drip paint in the early 1940s, in order to achieve increased liveliness, but Pollock took the technique to revolutionary limits.
