ONE: NUMBER 31, 1950
JACKSON POLLOCK, 1950
Alright. Get close. Pick one line on this thing and follow it. Nobody brushed that line on. It fell. Oil and enamel paint poured, dribbled, flung off sticks and stiff, crusted brushes. Pollock moving around a canvas spread across the floor of a barn in Springs, Long Island. The brush barely touching it. Most of the paint arriving through the air. So any line you pick is a record of his body. His arm. His wrist. His weight shifting as he moves along seventeen and a half feet of canvas. A guy moving through 1950, still in there. Now try to find the middle. Go ahead. There isn’t one. Art-history people call this “all-over,” which basically means nothing gets to be the star. No center. No main event. Every inch gets the same attention. Your eye grabs a line, follows it, loses it, grabs another one. The painting never tells you where to go. It just keeps happening. For centuries, a Western painting was basically a window. You looked through it at something. A face. A landscape. A bowl of fruit. 'God'. Pollock shuts the window. There’s nothing behind this painting. The paint is the thing. And everywhere you look, there’s proof that somebody was here. Walking. Reaching. Stopping. Changing direction. The canvas isn’t showing you what happened. It’s where it happened. And here’s where the story gets rough. Pollock was sober when he made this. He’d been off alcohol for about two years, and those two years, 1948 to 1950, are when the paintings that made him Pollock came pouring out. Then a photographer named Hans Namuth came to Springs to photograph and film him working. You can still watch it. Pollock circling the canvas. Paint running off a stick. Calm, focused, completely inside the thing. According to the story, they finished filming on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Pollock went inside, pulled out a bottle, and poured himself a drink. His first in two years. That stretch was over. So go back to the line you were following. Seventeen and a half feet of paint, made during the brief period when Pollock had hold of the whole thing.