Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)Jackson Pollock, 1950Inside the Drip: The Stories Behind Five Jackson Pollock Paintings
Between 1946 and 1952, in a cold barn on Long Island, Jackson Pollock took the canvas off the easel, laid it on the floor and began to paint from above. What came out of those six years changed what a painting could be. Here are five works that trace that journey, from the totems of his early years to the poured webs that made him famous.
PrologueA Painter Who Walked Into His Pictures
In 1945 Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, left New York City for a small farmhouse in Springs, near East Hampton. He turned the barn into a studio, and there he developed the method that would define him. He unrolled raw canvas across the floor and moved around it on all four sides. He used sticks, hardened brushes and even basting syringes to pour, flick and drip household enamel paint.
On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting.
Jackson Pollock, 1947
The result was a new kind of picture. It had no top or bottom, no central subject and no single point to rest your eye. Critics called it "action painting," and in 1949 Life magazine asked whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States.
No. 1 · 1946Circumcision: Before the Drip
Painted in January 1946, during his first winter in Springs, Circumcision shows Pollock just before the leap. Thick black lines, flashes of red and yellow and half-hidden totemic figures crowd the surface. You can see what he took from Picasso's fractured forms, from the Surrealists' idea of the unconscious and from the myths and ritual imagery that fascinated him in his Jungian years.
The painting now belongs to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Guggenheim was the collector who gave Pollock a contract and his first solo show. Circumcision is a reminder that the drip paintings did not come from nowhere. They grew out of this dense, mythic, brush-made world.
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No. 2 · 1947Alchemy: Transformation on the Floor
The title fits. Alchemy is one of the first true poured paintings, and it reads like a record of a substance changing state. Pollock layered oil, aluminum paint and enamel. He also pressed sand, pebbles, string and pieces of wooden stick into the wet surface, so the canvas became almost sculptural.
Look closely and you will find white lines that look like hidden symbols floating above the tangle of black, silver, red and blue. When conservators studied the painting in Florence in 2015, they confirmed how physical his process was: paint poured straight from the can, worked with sticks, and left to pool and wrinkle as it dried. Alchemy also lives in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
No. 3 · 1947Cathedral: Light Through the Web
From the same breakthrough year comes Cathedral, a tall, narrow canvas in black, white, grey and shimmering aluminum paint. The title makes you think of Gothic architecture. Lines rise and cross like ribs and tracery, and the metallic paint catches the light the way stained glass does.
There is no building in the picture, of course. The "cathedral" is made entirely of rhythm and density, an architecture of gesture. Its vertical format makes it one of the most elegant Pollocks to live with. The painting is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art.
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No. 4 · 1950Autumn Rhythm: The Peak
By 1950 Pollock was working at full confidence and on a huge scale. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) is more than five meters wide, built from black, white and brown enamel poured in long, looping arcs. That same autumn the photographer Hans Namuth filmed and photographed Pollock at work. The images of him moving around the canvas, cigarette in mouth, became some of the most famous pictures of an artist ever made.
Pollock had stopped giving his paintings evocative names and numbered them instead, so viewers would meet them without a story attached. The poetic title came later. The painting hangs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it still stops visitors in their tracks. Its warm, earthy palette makes it one of the easiest Pollocks to bring into a living room.
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No. 5 · 1952Blue Poles: The Painting That Shook a Nation
Blue Poles (Number 11) is one of the last great paintings Pollock made before his death in 1956, and it carries one of art history's best stories. Over a storm of orange, yellow, white and silver, eight dark blue "poles" lean across the canvas. They bring a rhythm and structure that his earlier all-over webs did not have.
In 1973 the National Gallery of Australia bought the painting for 1.3 million Australian dollars, then a record for an American painting. The purchase caused a political uproar, with newspapers calling it a waste of public money. Today Blue Poles is one of the most loved works in the Canberra collection, and it is valued at many times its original price.
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EpilogueLiving With a Pollock
Pollock's paintings were meant to surround you. He wanted the viewer to feel the energy of the gesture, not just look at a picture. That is why they work so well on a wall at home. They bring movement into a calm room and depth into a modern one. Each of these five works is available at AestheticsXart as a museum-quality matte poster, a stretched canvas or a framed canvas, with free worldwide shipping.
