You are in the Museum of Modern Art standing before Number 31, 1950. You are consumed by the scale and baffled by the merit. Another viewer irresistibly says, “my five-year-old could do that”.

 Impulsively you want to laugh, but you don’t.

But you think about it. You look again at the painting that wraps around your vision. You stand a little closer, perhaps hoping for insight. You start to find it intriguing, the overlaps of paint – the metallic aluminums, the enamels – the raw canvas, shoe prints, handprints, dirt. 

Is it just messy or a deliberate insult? 

Without warning the painting has life; you see it move. You become enclosed, entangled in a labyrinth, you feel choked, tight, dizzy. Too much. 

You back away.

The paintings of Jackson Pollock, even as they were being “produced” (returning to this verb later), were totally revolutionary – mysterious, controversial, contradictory, challenged, criticized and praised.

The term “avant-garde” is passé for Pollock. Harold Rosenberg, a notorious art critic of the period, labeled these “Action Painting”.

Pollock would have said “drip painting”. You have heard of “Jack the Dripper”, right?

Was this the work of a madman or a genius? Are we being duped?

And what WHAT WHAT brought painting to the floor, without subject or reference to reality, non-descriptive, non urgent, without a drawing or a brush, dominated by scribble and slosh and dirt and cigarette butts, shoe prints, spit and sweat – the tantrums of a child? The soul exposed?

What is the motivation?

What is the inspiration?

Imagination

Competition

Risk

Anger

Schizophrenia

Paranoia

Addiction

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), a mid-westerner who traveled, moved and was sensitive to nature and Eastern thought, landed in New York in 1930. He studied at the Art Students League and trained under Thomas Hart Benton, painting animated scenes of rural America, assisting Benton and David Siquerios on WPA projects. In 1938 he entered treatment for alcoholism and Jungian therapy. He was exempt from the army due to a nervous breakdown. His paintings were harsh, often with demonic forms and primordial archetypes. 

“Guardians of the Secret”, 1943, 48×75, San Francisco Museum of Art

In 1945 he married the painter Lee Krasner, who nurtured his work and his home. When Lee complained about his drinking he answered, “Try to think of it as a storm. It’ll soon be over”.

They moved to rural Long Island. The barn became a studio.

His paintings impressed Peggy Guggenheim. She gave him a monthly stipend. She commissioned him to do a mural for her apartment. She exhibited his work in her gallery, Art of This Century.

Prices soared.

It is post WWII. 1947 is the year of the radical change: the floor, walking around, walking in, raw canvas, household paints, glass, sand, sticks, trowels, dribbles, pours, slings and a shedding of the unconscious. Pollock became acquainted with the unknown, the unseen. The paintings birthed themselves.

Are you noticing the numbering? It takes the painting away from its association with reality. It is only the ochre of the raw canvas that relates to autumn.

So what is happening here?

Is it a ritual, a dance, a spiritual expulsion, a movie in hieroglyphics?

Color, contrast, viscosity, line, direction, density and depth. Not the Renaissance kind.

There is no one place to focus or rest. We are barred from entering but invited to inspect.

Is it cathartic?

After the early 1950s as the “drip” paintings lose their energy, Pollock’s frustrations boil. His “bad boy behavior” and his anxiety over performance, production, commercialization and expectations lead to depression and grizzly-bear scenes at the Cedar Tavern hangout of his artist friends – and at home. He alienates some of them. He crashes his car only to be given another – a convertible in trade for two of his paintings.

In August of 1956 he crashes the convertible driving home from a party, and dies.

His paramour, Ruth Kligman, lives but with serious injuries. Her friend Edith Metzger dies.

Critics and historians have identified this period and style of painting as Abstract Expressionism. The label finds its source in the expressionism of Germany following WWI, the ensuing drift to abstraction and non-objective styles in art, and in the anxiety of Post War II visions of atomic bombs, radiation, Communism and other atrocities and threats.

It is not a spoof.

It does not take a critic or history to see the break out.

It takes vision.

Jackson Pollock is the most pivotal painter in American Art. His legacy and others in his crew of brave visionaries (“The Irascibles”) are the heroes of modern art in America. Their works were sent to Europe as a “we will show you” in the early 1950s in the same way that Europe sent America the Armory Show in 1913, and with the same power as the exchange of jazz. These artists were the beginning of the New York School, the temperature gauge of “modern” for a decade, and a lasting coup in modern art.

If you hunger for more, there is a remarkable movie, POLLOCK, staring Ed Harris. Also check out the short film, Jackson Pollock, 51, by the photographer Hans Namuth (the 51 is 1951).