This concept is most popularly thought of as emerging in relation to the so-called "drip" paintings of Jackson Pollock and the "automatic writing" or "abstract calligraphy" of Mark Tobey in the 1950s, though the applicability of the term all-over painting would be wider than that.
Such a painting would fail to treat the top, for instance, differently from the bottom; the left than the right.
Uniform treatment of all sections of the surface are the hallmark of all-over painting.
All-over paintings would lack a dominant point of interest, or any indication of which way is "up."
[1][2][3][4][5] Clement Greenberg cited Janet Sobel's as the first instance of all-over painting he had seen.