Video from The Museum of Modern Art
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re still on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, and we’re standing in front of Jackson Pollock’s, one of his great seminal signature works, a painting called “One: 31, 1950.”
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:18] That’s a lot of numbers.
Dr. Zucker: [0:19] He made a real decision.
Dr. Harris: [0:21] Is it like Chopin, you know, “Nocturne No. 22”?
Dr. Zucker: [0:25] That’s exactly what it is. He had titled, and he would occasionally title again, or sometimes accept the titles that his friends developed for a painting after it was finished.
[0:34] Scholars have thought that Pollock numbered because he wanted not to close down meaning. He wanted the meaning to remain open, and that the system that was used by composers did that.
Dr. Harris: [0:45] That makes sense. He didn’t want any text associated with this image except something very open-ended.
Dr. Zucker: [0:50] The same year that he produced this, in fact, at the same time he produced this, he produced “Autumn Rhythm,” which hangs up at the Met.
Dr. Harris: [0:57] Which does have a name.
Dr. Zucker: [0:58] It does have a name. People look for the colors of fall. They look for…
Dr. Harris: [1:02] For the rhythm.
Dr. Zucker: [1:03] Yeah, exactly. They wonder what that is. It’s a series of associations.
Dr. Harris: [1:06] A minute ago, when we walked into the room, you said that you could tell when it was upside down, which I don’t think many people could do. So that would mean that there’s something very intentional about the drips, and their direction, and the form that this image takes that I think is probably lost on most viewers.
Dr. Zucker: [1:23] That’s a really interesting, complicated set of issues. When we think of Pollock’s drip paintings, we, quite rightfully, think of a kind of improvisation. And these paintings are a kind of improvisation.
Dr. Harris: [1:33] Like a jazz musician going off on a riff.
Dr. Zucker: [1:36] Right, exactly. But that same jazz musician probably knows how to control a saxophone brilliantly. And Pollock really understood how to control the paint in an incredibly unique way.
Dr. Harris: [1:45] It’s interesting that we don’t want to allow him that control.
Dr. Zucker: [1:48] We love the idea of the artist as the idiot savant. We want it with Van Gogh. We want it with everybody, these people who were somehow brilliant in this very narrow way. But you know, Pollock was very sophisticated visually and really understood what he was up to.
Dr. Harris: [2:00] So how does top and bottom work here?
Dr. Zucker: [2:02] Well, if you look at the canvas, this is a huge canvas, first of all. It’s one that he painted, of course, in the spring, painted horizontally, unstretched, and unprimed on a piece of raw canvas. It was cotton duck.
[2:13] He walked around the canvas, quite famously, and certainly, there’ve been many photographic documentations of him painting. But if you look at the painting, he really ordered the canvas in some very particular ways.
[2:26] First of all, the density of the paint is towards the center, and there is a frame around the edges, so that he knew exactly where he was going and where he was ending.
Dr. Harris: [2:36] That’s true.
Dr. Zucker: [2:36] At the same time, the density becomes most extreme a little bit more than a third of the way up the canvas. In fact, there’s a loose horizontal that’s about one-third of the way up the canvas, which in some ways functions to anchor the canvas and give it a center of gravity that’s low, rather than high, so it doesn’t feel unwieldy.
[3:00] In the classroom, if you take a slide of this painting and flip it over, the painting falls apart.
Dr. Harris: [3:06] Really?
Dr. Zucker: [3:06] Yeah.
Dr. Harris: [3:07] I wish we could do that here. Your mention of the horizontal reminded me of a horizon line, which is a funny thing to think about because he’s got the canvas flat on the floor. There is no horizon line.
Dr. Zucker: [3:17] I was consciously avoiding the word horizon line.
Dr. Harris: [3:19] It’s pretty inevitable association here though.
Dr. Zucker: [3:21] It is, because we really do see a space, the way in which those schemes of paint, those lines, fold into each other and become this incredibly dense spatial tank.
Dr. Harris: [3:31] It’s very powerful to stand in front of. It feels very enveloping and around one, even though one is standing separate from it.
Dr. Zucker: [3:41] It’s true. I want to go back to this idea, though, of his intent. There’s been a lot of discussion. His two great critical framers early on…
Dr. Harris: [3:48] Greenberg.
Dr. Zucker: [3:49] Greenberg and Rosenberg, had very different views on what Pollock was doing. Rosenburg very famously says that what we’re seeing in a museum is in some sense just a fossil of the ritual work of art, which was the act of making.
Dr. Harris: [4:04] The performance.
Dr. Zucker: [4:05] The performative element itself, right. Whereas Greenburg said it only became a work of art when it was lifted off the floor into the realm of the vertical and entered into the continuum of the history of art.
Dr. Harris: [4:16] It’s an interesting thing. We’re not looking at it the way that the artist himself looked at it and created it, which is probably something that’s never happened before.
Dr. Zucker: [4:24] Because of that, sometimes, I find myself going to the edge of the canvas and cocking my head to the side so that I can see across the canvas the way that Pollock would have. It’s a very different experience.
Dr. Harris: [4:34] I wonder how he kept both of those things in his head.
Dr. Zucker: [4:39] I think he was very conscious of what this painting would look like when it did reach the vertical.
Dr. Harris: [4:43] He must have. He was speaking to a tradition of painting, the history of painting.
Dr. Zucker: [4:47] There is one case, though, when he asked Tony Smith, who put together some of his most important exhibitions, to hang a painting horizontally on the ceiling in a gallery, in Betty Parsons.
Dr. Harris: [5:00] Really?
Dr. Zucker: [5:00] Yeah.
Dr. Harris: [5:00] That’s interesting.
Dr. Zucker: [5:01] There was one case when you would have looked across the canvas, or at least up at it.
Dr. Harris: [5:06] I’m looking now, and there are some people standing front of it and pretending that they’re dripping. The figures in front of that dense network of drips and lines look so strange. There’s something. I don’t know.
Dr. Zucker: [5:19] There’s some very famous photographs of “Vogue” models in front of these canvases. They look incredibly striking. There’s so many ways to approach this painting.
[5:33] One of the things that is most important to take away from Pollock is that this is not a canvas that’s about representing a vase of flowers, a human body. It’s really a painting that represents the action and the activity of painting itself.
Dr. Harris: [5:49] The gesture. The painterly gesture.
Dr. Zucker: [5:52] The act of making, but, yes, gesture, absolutely.
Dr. Harris: [5:55] But there’s no paintbrush, which is the thing we think about when we think about gesture.
Dr. Zucker: [5:59] No. Think about it this way. When you look at any of those individual lines of paint, they get thicker and thinner. Sometimes, they pool. When they pool, you get the sense that Pollock stopped, and the paint continued to drip. When his arm moved slowly, you have a thicker line. When you have this thinning line, you know that he sped up.
[6:18] This becomes almost a choreographic notation, where you can almost begin to reconstruct how he moved around this. It’s a broader gesture. It’s not the gesture of the brush. It’s not the gesture even of the hand. It’s the gesture of the entire body.
Dr. Harris: [6:31] That’s interesting. I can feel that. But at the same time, I feel a tension. It looks like there’s some way that, in its multifariousness and its density, that it seems like a natural thing and not something that was made.
Dr. Zucker: [6:47] That’s maybe tying back into the point you made earlier about us not wanting Pollock to have been overly conscious. We want this to somehow be an act of nature. Of course, that ties in beautifully with this whole myth.
[6:57] There’s this very famous moment early in Pollock’s career when Lee Krasner, an extraordinary artist in her own right, and, of course, Pollock’s wife, would introduce him to Hans Hofmann, the great German abstractionist. Hofmann would say to Pollock, “You need to look more closely at nature,” when Hofmann was reviewing Pollock’s early work. Pollock is said to have responded, “I am nature.”
Dr. Harris: [7:19] Interesting.
[7:19] [music]
