(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)