Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
Pollock laid the canvas on the floor and dripped, flung and poured paint around it. He said he was “in the painting”. The method is known as drip painting or action painting.
There is no centre and no edge that matters more than any other – an “all-over” painting.
Jackson Pollock painted Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) in the autumn of 1950 in his studio at Springs on Long Island, outside New York. The studio was a converted barn. He lived there with his wife, the artist Lee Krasner. Between 1947 and 1950 he developed the method that made him famous. The painting belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The canvas is more than five metres wide and over two and a half metres high. The surface is covered with a web of lines, drips and spatters in black, white and browns. There is no subject, no centre and no clear beginning or end. The lines loop back and forth, and the black lines form a kind of skeleton into which the lighter colours are woven.
The composition is called all-over, because the whole surface is equally important. Even so, there is a rhythm in the picture. The lines gather in dense passages and thin out elsewhere, rather like music with rests and chords. The title points to this.
Pollock laid the canvas on the floor and moved around and over it. He dripped and flung paint from brushes, sticks and cans. He often used enamel and industrial paint, which was more fluid than ordinary oil paint. The canvas was unprimed, and the paint partly soaked into the weave. He himself said that he felt he was “in” the painting while he worked.
In the same year that Autumn Rhythm was made, Pollock was photographed and filmed at work by the photographer Hans Namuth. The images spread quickly and made the working process itself part of the artwork. The critic Harold Rosenberg called such painting action painting, while Clement Greenberg emphasised the picture surface and the paint.
Pollock’s work has been interpreted in many ways: as an expression of the unconscious, as the rhythms of nature or as an entirely new way of thinking about painting. He became a symbol of American art’s emancipation from Europe after the Second World War. A major article in Life magazine in 1949 had made him known to a wide public. Pollock had studied under the painter Thomas Hart Benton and had been influenced by the Mexican muralists and by the Surrealists’ automatic drawing, in which the hand was to move freely without conscious control.
The Metropolitan Museum bought the painting in 1957, the year after Pollock was killed in a car crash. Autumn Rhythm is regarded as one of the finest examples of Abstract Expressionism. It has influenced generations of artists and has become a symbol of freedom in modern painting.