(jazz music)

- [Steven] We're in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,

looking at an enormous
painting by Jackson Pollock.

This is 17 feet wide and he
originally titled it "Number 30"

but then later "Autumn Rhythm."

So the museum is creating a compromise

and they're calling it
"Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)".

- [Beth] This is a complicated painting.

And for some reason to me today

in the midst of the pandemic,

less than two weeks before
a presidential election,

I feel like I might be projecting
some of my own darkness

into this painting that I
know is painted in 1950,

just five years after
the end of World War II.

- [Steven] A lot of the discussion

about the abstract expressionists

of which Pollock was one
of the leading figures

deals with the issue of
an angst and anxiety.

These were issues that were
dominant in the post-war moment.

1950 was the Cold War.

The atomic bombs were threatening

in a way that had never happened
before in human history.

The enormity of the Holocaust

had been revealed only
a few years earlier.

- [Beth] And there were
the trials of Nazis

that went on for years
after the end of the war.

I can imagine there
was a sense for artists

that a new language was needed to express

this post World War II era

and that the old systems of naturalism

coming out of the Renaissance

was not a language that was viable

given the new circumstances.

- [Steven] I think a number of artists

didn't feel that
naturalism, that figuration,

the representation of the
human body was going to cut it.

They were looking for something
that was more profound,

that was able to grapple
with existential issues,

issues of human existence and
the potential extinguishing

of human existence.

- [Beth] If you think about
the decade or two before this,

we have surrealism and this
interest in the unconscious

and delving beyond the
conscious everyday mind

and looking for a greater, deeper truth

about human existence, about
the way our minds work.

- [Steven] Well, there was this idea

that goes back to the surrealist.

It goes back even to Dada,

that the conscious rational
mind got in the way,

that it was antithetical
to the creative impulse,

that if we could somehow
step out of the way

and allow something more elemental,

more unintentional to come to the fore,

that would somehow be more
truthful and more universal.

What we're seeing is a
high point in modern art,

where artists were stepping
away from the representation

of nature,

something that had been
central to the making of art,

this interest in something that
was not abstract in nature,

but it was purely abstract.

It's radicality can't be overstated.

This was completely upending
the traditions of image-making.

He's turning away from the
representation of nature

and looking into himself,
his own physical movements,

his own emotional state at
this specific moment in time.

- [Beth] So we're not looking at,

for example, analytic cubism,
which is an abstraction

from nature where Picasso takes a guitar

and disassembles it into geometric forms,

but here, he's not starting from nature,

but starting from the
place of an individual

in a moment in time.

- [Steven] And in a particular place,

this was made in his studio, a small barn

in the back of the
house at Jackson Pollock

and Lee Krasner's property

out in the Springs in East Hampton.

It's a relatively small space.

This is an enormous canvas,
he unrolled it on the floor.

He didn't prime it, he didn't add gesso.

He didn't seal the surface.

He painted directly on the raw canvas,

but I can't say even that he painted it,

he didn't touch the canvas with his brush.

He moved over the canvas
and let paint fall on it.

- [Beth] So there is a kind of rawness.

For centuries, whenever an artist painted,

not only did they prime the canvas,

but they most often prepared drawings,

organize the composition,
thought it through.

There was a real intentionality
and consciousness.

That was an important part of
the value of a work of art.

- [Steven] And here he's
flipping that value on its head.

Pollock used house paint,
that black is an enamel.

It's a break with the refinements
of fine art materials,

bringing art into the real world.

And that's a reminder
that Pollock had been,

especially earlier in his career,

interested in social issues.

This is an enormous canvas
that might remind us

of large scale mural paintings.

- [Beth] So he's looking back

to the great Mexican muralists

like Siqueiros and Diego Rivera,

and thinking about the
enormous scale of those murals

and in art, that was not a
small paintings for a collector,

but large paintings for the masses.

- [Steven] What Pollock is after here

is a kind of spontaneity,
it's an immediate invention.

He's drawing on his tremendous skill,

but he's then letting loose,
and probably the best analogy

is to a highly accomplished jazz musician.

Somebody who can play the
saxophone or the piano

with extraordinary skill,

but then allows themselves to riff,

allows themselves to play
and allows the unconscious

and the moment to come to the fore.

- [Beth] And the emotion of the moment

becomes the guiding principles.

- [Steven] And I want
to go back to a point

you made a moment before

he's not painting on unprimed canvas,

simply to break with tradition.

He wants the paint to seep in
and stay in the canvas itself,

not to ride on its surface always.

And so there was a specific
quality that was achievable

because the paint was in direct contact

with the weave of the cloth.

- [Beth] And there's so many ways

that we experienced the paint here.

We see areas where it
did seep into the fabric.

We see dots that look like splashes.

We see other dots that have
a feeling of a night sky.

We see areas where the paint
has pulled up and dried

and cracked.

We see areas where the paint
is soft and atmospheric,

areas where it's sharp and
linear, where it's matte,

areas where it's shiny.

There's so much to explore
when you got up close.

- [Steven] But then you can also pull back

and you can see these
long trails of paint.

And you can imagine the
artist moving around

and rhythmically with
large arching motions,

flinging that paint into the air

and allowing gravity to pull it down.

The surface of this painting
then becomes of register

of Pollock's movement through
time and through space.

It becomes a kind of stage.

And in one sense, it's a shame

that the painting is
vertical hanging on the wall

because it was made
horizontally, he was over it.

And sometimes when I walk up to a Pollock,

I'll look at it from the
side and tilt my head

so I can look across it the way he saw it,

more as an arena to act in
than a canvas to look at it.

(jazz music)