ONE: NUMBER 31, 1950
JACKSON POLLOCK, 1950
Alright. Get close. No brush ever touched this canvas. One: Number 31, 1950. Jackson Pollock. 1950. I mean it. Zero brushstrokes. Every line here is a pour — enamel and oil paint coming off a stick Pollock held over the canvas while he walked around it on a barn floor in Springs, Long Island. The paint landed wherever his arm sent it. So look at any line. Any single line. You're looking at his arm. His wrist. His weight shifting as he stepped across eighteen feet of canvas. A frozen afternoon. Somebody's afternoon, in 1950, preserved in drip. Now try this. Try to find the middle of the painting. You can't. There isn't one. Pollock called it "all-over." No center. The paint fills every square inch with the same density of attention. The painting doesn't direct you — it just keeps going as long as you keep looking. Step back. It's almost eighteen feet wide. You literally can't take it in without turning your head. Okay. So why is this the painting people stop at? Why is this guy the guy everything gets compared to? For five hundred years, a painting was a window. You looked through it at something — a face, a landscape, a fruit bowl, god. After Pollock, a painting can be the record of a body in a room. The window closes. What you're looking at is the painter himself. Everything after him is either an extension of that move or an argument against it. Warhol, Rothko, Johns, minimalism, performance art — every single one of them owes this guy either a paycheck or a punch in the face. He's the axis. The whole twentieth century swings on him. Here's the part that kills me. Pollock was sober when he made this. Sober. He'd been dry for two years. And those two years — 1948, 1949, 1950 — are when he made every painting anyone remembers him for. Everything. The whole Pollock. In the fall of 1950, a photographer — Hans Namuth — drives out to the barn and starts filming him work. Multiple sessions. You can look up the footage. Pollock clear-eyed, walking around the canvas on the floor, pouring paint off a stick, getting it exactly right. The day Namuth finished filming was Thanksgiving. Pollock walked inside, sat down to dinner — and poured himself a whiskey. He was never really sober again. He essentially never made another painting like this one. Which is what you're standing in front of. Eighteen feet of canvas that swung the twentieth century on its axis, painted by a man in the last months he could do it.