Key Ideas: Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950)
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Aleksandra ButorovicKey Ideas: Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950)
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Aleksandra ButorovicKey Ideas
Pollock's tough and unsettled early life growing up in the American West
shaped him into the bullish character he would become. Later, a series of
influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent
painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a
large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to describe the unconscious;
and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space.
In 1939, Pollock began visiting a Jungian analyst to treat his alcoholism, and
his analyst encouraged him to create drawings. These would later feed his
paintings, and they shaped Pollock's understanding of his pictures not only as
outpourings of his own mind, but expressions that might stand for the terror of
all modern humanity living in the shadow of nuclear war.
Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in
the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories
of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.
Most Important Art
Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950)
While only one painting from Pollock's 1950 solo exhibition was
actually sold, the show gained much attention. It was described
by Art News as one of the three best exhibitions of the year,
and Cecil Beaton staged a famous fashion shoot in the
exhibition space, which subsequently appeared
in Vogue. Autumn Rhythm was one of the major works which
appeared in that show. As with many of Pollock's paintings, he
began it with a linear framework of diluted black paint which in
many areas soaked through the unprimed canvas. Over this he
applied more skeins of paint in various colors - lines thick and
thin, light and dark, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical.
As the title suggests, the coloring, horizontal orientation, and
sense of ground and space in Autumn Rhythm are strongly
evocative of nature. The balance between control and chance
that Pollock maintained throughout his working process
produced compositions that can have as much calm tranquillity
as some works by Rothko.
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Jackson Pollock Artworks in Focus:
Biography
Childhood
Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, the fifth and
youngest son of a family of Irish-Scottish extraction. Pollock was only ten
months old when the family moved to San Diego. His father's work as a
surveyor would force them to move repeatedly around the Southwest in
subsequent years, until, when Pollock was aged nine, his father abandoned
the family, only to return when Jackson himself had left home. The West of
Pollock's childhood provided a tough upbringing, but he grew to love nature -
animals and the expanse of the land - and while living in Phoenix in 1923 he
discovered Native American art.
Early Training
Pollock attended the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where he
befriended Philip Guston, and where he was also introduced to theosophical
ideas which prepared him for his later interests in Surrealism and
psychoanalysis. Two of Pollock's older brothers, Charles and Sanford, also
pursued careers as artists, and it was their encouragement which lured him to
New York in 1930, where he studied under Regionalist painter Thomas Hart
Benton at the Art Students League.
In New York Pollock was attracted to Old Masters and began to study mural
painting. He posed for Benton's 1930-31 murals at the New School for Social
Research, and he met the prominent Mexican muralist José Clemente
Orozco. He later spent a summer observing Diego Rivera paint murals at the
New Workers School, and in 1936 he joined the Experimental Workshop of
another muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, where he learned to employ
unorthodox painting techniques. Pollock's own canvas, Going West (1934-35),
blends many of these influences and is typical of his style at this time. In 1937,
he was assigned to the Easel Division of Works Progress Administration's
Federal Art Project.
During much of the 1930s Pollock lived with his brothers in Greenwich Village,
and was at times so poor that he had to work as a janitor and steal food to
survive. In 1932, however, he was invited to participate in the 8th Exhibition of
Watercolors, Pastels and Drawings by American and French Artists at the
Brooklyn Museum, his first exhibition.
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Jackson Pollock Biography Continues
Legacy
Pollock's immediate legacy was certainly felt most by other painters. His work
brought together elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism, and
transcended them all. Beside that achievement even greats such as de
Kooning, who remained closer to Cubism, and hung on to figurative imagery,
seemed to fall short. And the best among subsequent generations of painters
would all have to take on his achievement, just as Pollock himself had
wrestled with Picasso.
And as early as 1958, when pioneering performance artist Allan
Kaprow explicitly addressed the question of his legacy in an article for Art
News, some were beginning to wonder if Pollock might even have opened up
possibilities outside of the realm of painting. To borrow critic Harold
Rosenberg's words, Pollock had re-imagined the canvas not as "a space in
which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object.. [but as] an
arena in which to act." And it was a short step from this realization to
interpreting Pollock's balletic moves around the canvas as a species of
performance art. Since then, Pollock's reputation has only increased. The
subject of many biographies, a movie biopic, and major retrospectives, he has
become not only one of the most famous symbols of the alienated modern
artist, but also an embodiment for critics and historians of American
modernism in its finest hour.