One: Number 31, 1950

Jackson Pollock, 1950

Alright. Pick one of those looping lines, follow it for a second. Now picture Pollock making it. It's 1950, he's working in a barn in Springs out on Long Island. He's got the canvas spread across the floor, seventeen and a half feet of it. He's moving around it with a stick, paint running off the end. Sometimes it's one of those stiff, crusted brushes. Sometimes he just tips the can and pours. Most of the paint gets there through the air. Lands on the canvas. Supposedly there's even a fly caught in the black paint. It's a barn. You get flies. Anyway, follow that line again. Where it swings, where it thins out, where it changes direction. That's his arm moving. His wrist turning. His weight shifting as he reaches. That line you've been following is something he did. So the canvas isn't showing you what happened. It's where it happened. And that gives other painters a whole different idea of what the job could be. Willem de Kooning put it this way: "He busted our idea of a picture all to hell." He goes on to say there could be new paintings again. Anyway, Pollock was sober when he painted this. He'd stopped drinking in 1948, and some of the paintings that made him famous came out of those two years. The year before this one, Life magazine had asked if he was the greatest living painter in the United States. Then this photographer, Hans Namuth, comes out to photograph and film him working. You can still watch it. Pollock moving around the canvas, paint coming off the stick. Watch how carefully he places it. By the last filming session, they're outside. Pollock's painting on a sheet of glass with the camera underneath. You can watch the paint coming toward you. It's November. Cold. The story goes they come back into the house, and Pollock goes over to the sink, reaches down, pulls out a bottle of whiskey, pours himself a big glass, and tells Namuth, "This is the first drink I've had in two years."

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