Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956)
Dripped ink and enamel on paper
From 1942, when he had his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery, Art of This Century, until his death in an automobile crash at age forty-four in 1956, Jackson Pollock's volatile art and personality made him a dominant and revolutionary figure in the art world. Even long dead, his celebrity survives in the large body of work that is disseminated around the globe. One cannot speak about Pollock's late work—especially his famous mural-size paintings, such as Autumn Rhythm (57.92)—without acknowledging his reinvention and appropriation of drawing processes.
In the mid-1940s, when he became dissatisfied with representational art, Pollock began to conceive of a way to render things imagined, rather than things that were seen. In 1947, he devised a radically new technique whereby paint was dripped and poured (as well as spattered, flung, and pooled) over canvas or paper using a variety of unconventional tools (e.g., sticks, brush handles, cans, etc). Although such works employed paint media, his means of applying this media and his reliance on line as his primary means of expression brought these works into the realm of drawing. They redefined the parameters of traditional painting and drawing, and proposed instead a new and innovative direction for modern art. As Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife and fellow Abstract Expressionist painter, noted, his work "seemed like monumental drawing, or maybe painting with the immediacy of drawing—some new category" (quoted in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, New York, 1972, p. 182).
This large untitled work on paper displays the great control and facility that Pollock also applied to his considerably larger canvases. Dripping skeins of bright red enamel over a linear understructure of black ink, his hand moved like a virtuoso around the sheet. Lines thicken and thin, punctuate and envelop, with poetic grace. The dynamic abstract composition that results embodies a sense of harnessed energy and rapid motion.
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950
Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956)
Enamel on canvas
Pollock had created his first "drip" painting in 1947, the product of a radical new approach to paint handling. With Autumn Rhythm, made in October of 1950, the artist is at the height of his powers. In this nonrepresentational picture, thinned paint was applied to unprimed, unstretched canvas that lay flat on the floor rather than propped on an easel. Poured, dripped, dribbled, scumbled, flicked, and splattered, the pigment was applied in the most unorthodox means. The artist also used sticks, trowels, knives—in short, anything but the traditional painter's implements—to build up dense, lyrical compositions comprised of intricate skeins of line. There's no central point of focus, no hierarchy of elements in this allover composition in which every bit of the surface is equally significant. The artist worked with the canvas flat on the floor, constantly moving all around it while applying the paint and working from all four sides.
Size is significant: Autumn Rhythm is 207 inches wide. It assumes the scale of an environment, enveloping both for the artist as he created it and for viewers who confront it. The work is a record of its process of coming-into-being. Its dynamic visual rhythms and sensations—buoyant, heavy, graceful, arcing, swirling, pooling lines of color—are direct evidence of the very physical choreography of applying the paint with the artist's new methods. Spontaneity was a critical element. But lack of premeditation should not be confused with ceding control; as Pollock stated, "I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident."
For Pollock, as for the Abstract Expressionists in general, art had to convey significant or revelatory content. He had arrived at abstraction having studied with Thomas Hart Benton, worked briefly with the Mexican muralists, confronted the methods and philosophy of the Surrealists, and immersed himself in a study of myth, archetype, and ancient and "primitive" art. And the divide between abstraction and figuration was more nuanced—there was a back-and-forth at various moments in his career. Toward the end of his life (he died in a car accident in 1956), he said, "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're working out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. … Painting is a state of being. … Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."
Number 28, 1950, 1950
Enamel on canvas
Jackson Pollock painted this mural-size canvas early in the summer of 1950. Having moved from Manhattan to eastern Long Island, in 1947 he returned to the drip and pour techniques that he may have learned ten years earlier from David Alfaro Siquieros. The resulting "allover" paintings, made from 1947 to 1950, constitute his greatest achievement.
Like almost all his New York colleagues, Pollock began his abstractions with drawings of figures, which were subsequently abstracted or obliterated. This canvas shows on its verso traces of drawing in black and yellow that are no longer visible on the surface, having been obscured by layers of other colors. Executed on the floor of his studio on a canvas roll that he later cut and stretched, the composition was worked on from all four sides of the rectangle. Using various techniques—pouring enamel paint from a hole in the can, dropping from a stick, flinging, and drizzling—he applied paint from a distance above the surface, using gravity and motion to form linear skeins.
The dominant critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, called such works "polyphonic." "Knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar elements," he wrote, this art "repeats itself without strong variation from one end of the canvas to the other, and dispenses, apparently, with beginning, middle, and ending."
Painting as a concept
A tragic icon of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) took influences from Picasso and Mexican surrealism and developed his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Though his name inevitably conjures up images of the drip paintings for which he is most famous, this technique was only developed midway through his career. The progression from his earlier work to his final "action" paintings —a veritable revolution of painting as a concept—reveals the genius of this tortured artist whom many call the greatest modern American painter.
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), American abstract painter, who developed a technique for applying paint by pouring or dripping it onto canvases laid on the floor. With this method Pollock produced intricate interlaced webs of paint, as in Black and White (1948, private collection). Rapid and seemingly impulsive execution like Pollock’s became a hallmark of abstract expressionism, a movement that emphasized the spontaneous gestures of the artist.
Born in Cody, Wyoming, Pollock moved to New York City in 1930 to study at the Art Students League with American artist Thomas Hart Benton. Pollock’s early paintings, realistic scenes of life in America, clearly reflect Benton’s influence. As his career progressed, Pollock rejected his teacher’s representational subject matter, but retained Benton’s emphasis on rhythmic, dynamic composition. In New York, Pollock was also exposed to the work of Mexican mural painters José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their experimental techniques, large scale, and use of industrial paints had a lasting impact on Pollock’s work.
The surrealism movement was another significant influence upon Pollock, whose ideas about the relevance of the unconscious to artistic creativity coincided with his own experience. As part of treatment for alcoholism, Pollock underwent psychoanalysis; his therapists, who followed the teachings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, encouraged him to analyze his drawings for clues to his unconscious mental processes. Surrealist artists had also hoped to tap into the unconscious through automatism, a technique in which the artist’s hand wanders across the painting’s surface with as little conscious control as possible. In early works such as The She-Wolf (1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), Pollock combined surrealist automatism with subject matter that reflects his interests in ancient sculpture, non-Western art, and the work of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.
After moving to a larger studio on Long Island in 1947, Pollock began creating his characteristic large-scale abstractions. He placed the canvas on the floor, attacked it from all directions, and poured paint directly on it. His new method resulted in part from his interest in Native American sand paintings, which are created on the ground with sand of various colors let loose from the hand. Typical of this period, Autumn Rhythm (1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) is clearly abstract, since it makes no direct reference to the external world. However, Pollock described his abstraction as an attempt to evoke the rhythmic energy of nature (as the title Autumn Rhythm indicates).
