Happenings have been called by some “painters’ theater,” which means—aside from the fact that most of the people who do them are painters—that they can be described as animated paintings, more accurately as “animated collages” or “trompe l’oeil brought to life.” Further, the appearance of Happenings can be described as one logical development of the New York school of painting of the fifties. The gigantic size of many of the canvases painted in New York in the last decade, designed to overwhelm and envelop the spectator, plus the increasing use of materials other than paint to adhere to, and
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