W ORKING FROM W ITHIN :

Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (30) and

The Naturalism of the Self
By Jamie Magruder

Professor Elizabeth Guffey

History of Art Survey II
May 4, 2004
 History of Art Survey II
Autumn Rhythm (30)
Jamie Magruder

Many visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

perhaps still encounter Jackson Pollock’s monumental wall painting,

Autumn Rhythm (30), with wonder or scorn.1 Even the artist’s

enthusiastic supporter, Clement Greenberg, remarked: “I think it is one

of the tragedies of our time that great painting has to do without a

‘recognizable’ subject matter.”2 Mr. Frankfurter went so far as to

associate the dissolution of figural representation in modern art with

the end of a supposedly Classical-Christian aesthetic that

communicated meaning beyond its formal attributes. Jackson Pollock,

though, insisted that he was neither abstract nor an expressionist, nor

did he explain his art in transcendental terms. Rather, his work focused

on biomorphic forms or the suggestion of forms, dissolved in webs of

seemingly chaotic lines. Autumn Rhythm (30) exemplifies this struggle

to situate man in the modern world of invisible forces that the sciences

were beginning to uncover.

Jackson Pollock’s search for new ways of painting grew from a

desire to express this new reality that emerging technologies were

shaping. He experimented with different surfaces, such as linoleum

and Masonite, and with different painting techniques, such as pouring

and spraying, from at least the time that he joined David Siqueiros’

1
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (30), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1957 (57.92).
2
Emphasis original, Clement Greenberg, “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” Life 11 October 1948: 78.

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workshop in 1936.3 When he later experimented with painting on glass

in 1950, he described the exhilaration of this attempt as a modern act

suited to “modern architecture – in modern construction [emphasis

added].”4 He also insisted “that the modern painter cannot express this

age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the

Renaissance.”5 For Pollock this list of new technologies represents what

he viewed as the “inner world” which science was revealing within the

natural order: “the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.”6 It was

at once a world cultivated by humans and an impersonal environment

indifferent to the humanity that inhabited it. In light of the tendency of

many American writers in the inter-war period to compare “Modern

Man” to “primitive man,”7 Pollock’s use of overall pouring and interest

in the unconscious are not separate from nature but an expression of

natural forces within and without humanity.

Although Jackson Pollock first gained critical attention in the

1942 group exhibition at McMillen Inc., the attention of the American

public came with a Life magazine article late in 1949,8 as new

technologies seemed to be transforming the average American’s life.

3
Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock Vol. 3 Modern Masters Series (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), 23.
4
Jackson Pollock, “Interview with William Wright,” 1950 in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and
Reviews (=JP) ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 23.
5
Ibid., 20.
6
Ibid., 21.
7
Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven,
CT: Yale UP, 1993), 62.
8
Dorothy Seiberling, “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?,” Life 8
August 1949: 42-45.

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In 1948 alone, the theory of quantum physics was published, and

Alfred Hitchcock made his first color film, using a radical continuous

shot. Like Pollock, Hitchcock used workspace unconventionally, a

dining room with a camera on rails around the edge, which allowed

him to move fluidly around his “canvas” shooting the film in three or

four continuous takes. With the advent of the Ed Sullivan show in 1949,

the same inner forces that were captivating the attention of scientists

and artists extended a view of American life, as if by magic, into the

average living room. Autumn Rhythm (30) seemed to express this new

world, shaped by Technicolor films and live television, in monumental

paintings somewhere between the “silver screen” and the “tube.”

Pollock’s structural use of black and white and whirling lines seem to

mimic the emerging verbal metaphors of the two formats, at the same

time portraying the common visual anomalies seen in their test

patterns and “snow” or “grain.”

It is no surprise that Jackson Pollock’s energetic overall

compositions shocked the nation with their seemingly chaotic and

infinite burst of black and white, so powerful a convention of morality

and order, mixed with deep colors, which the Expressionists had used

to signify elemental emotions. Autumn Rhythm (30), perhaps, has

succeeded as a cultural icon because its allusion to the natural world

appeared to signify a new human relationship to nature very much like

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the one that captivated Jackson Pollock, that of being “in the

painting.”9 This metaphor also spoke to the perception of actors being

in the television set, which provided so much hilarity in cartoons and

sit-coms. The irony is that Pollock’s method of pouring paint onto

unstretched canvas on the floor positioned him over his paintings in a

figurative domination, as many people felt the new technologies

placed humanity over nature. His use of metallic paints seemed to hint

at industrialization as the new environment as well. Whether it was his

intention to convey all these themes or whether critics tied them

specifically to discernible forms in his work is beside the point, because

Pollock expressed his own concerns in vague terms of a Modernism

that was breaking beyond a once insular elite into a discourse of

Modernism discovering a new culture of affordable and pervasive

broadcast media.

In his concern to find an adequate formal expression for this

modern life, Pollock seems to have pursued very much the same kind

of Modernism explicated by Clement Greenberg, “that the conventions

not essential to the viability of a medium be discarded as soon as they

are recognized.”10 Artists like Matisse and Picasso had already

challenged conventional renderings of space, volume and form in a

variety of shocking works. Autumn Rhythm (30) stood at the apex of

9
Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibilities, Winter 1947-48 in JP, 18.
10
Clement Greenberg, “American-Type Painting,” Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (=AE) ed.
Clifford Ross (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 235.

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Pollock’s “overall” paintings as a seeming Babel of all that painting had

once embodied. In reality though, Jackson Pollock had begun painting

overall compositions, like Flame, as early as 1934. These works tended

to feature the same rhythmic repetition of line and restricted palette as

later works. Where Flame focused on red and white streaks set in a

black ground, Autumn Rhythm (30) used a swirling web of black and

white streaked with green against a tan ground. Where the earlier

work featured mainly thick, vertical brush strokes with some short

curves, the later work combined the rhythm of the earlier short,

independent lines with seemingly endless circles looping over one

another. Autumn Rhythm’s formal emphasis on simplicity, immediacy

and monumentality seemed to signify the elemental forces of modern

life in familiar terms: Hitchcock’s indifferent portrayal of a gay couple’s

thrill killing; the wild solos of Be-bop jazz that the Miles Davis nonet

brought out of New York clubs with their 1949 album, Birth of the Cool;

and the detonation of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union that same

year.

These monumental forces of nature were neither the

transcendental sublime that Kant had expressed, nor the idiosyncratic

automatism of the Surrealists in the preceding decade. As recent

scholarship has noted, Jackson Pollock only half-heartedly took part in

the titling of his works throughout his life, which his wife or dealer

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more often encouraged to facilitate sale.11 From the beginning, he

acknowledged that he was “particularly impressed with [the European

exile painters’] concept of the source of art being the unconscious.”12

This openness did not mean that Pollock painted in some sort of trance

of existential, almost mindless freedom, as some critics suggested

early on.13 Whereas foreign and domestic critics seemed to love or

hate him for what they perceived to be chaos, Jackson Pollock insisted

that he controlled his imagery.14 He explained that one should

approach his works “passively – and try to receive what the painting

has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of

what they are to be looking for.”15 His insistence that the painting has

something to offer implies that he stood in the mainstream of Western

art, insisting that he had programmed certain content in the

production of art that could be accessed to a certain extent by the

viewer. In his affirmation of formal communication, Jackson Pollock was

extending the painterly tradition of representing nature, not breaking

it. The question remains of how to decipher a painting like Autumn

11
Anna C. Chave, “Pollock and Krasner: Script and Postscript,” RES (Cambridge, MA) 24 (Autumn 1993)
in JP, 264.
12
Anonymous, “Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire,” Arts and Architecture (Los Angeles) 61, 2 (February
1944) in JP, 16.
13
This is the implication of Harold Rosenberg’s, “The American Action Painters,” 1952 in AE, 233.
Rosenberg explicitly turned away from any romantic notions about Pollock in “The Search for Jackson
Pollock,” Art News 59, 10 (February 1961).
14
Witness the now famous exchange between Bruno Alfieri’s review of his 1950 exhibition in Venice,
Time’s derisive coverage of that review and Pollock’s blunt retort to the charges of chaos: NO CHAOS
DAMN IT. DAMNED BUSY PAINTING…THINK YOU LEFT OUT MOST EXCITING PART OF MR.
ALFIERI’S PIECE. [That is, his raves about Pollock’s primacy in modern art!] See JP, 68-71.
15
Jackson Pollock, “Interview with William Wright,” 1950 in JP, 20.

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Rhythm (30) that defies the traditional structure of figuration and

abstraction.

Like many in his circle, Pollock was interested in the promise of

new disciplines like psychology and anthropology to unlock a universal

language of human symbols and experiences.16 He did not so much

abandon figuration as submerge it in successive webs of color and

texture. In fact, a recent examination of Hans Namuth’s 1950 film

footage of Pollock painting used computer technology to align stills,

yielding a synoptic view of Autumn Rhythm (30) at several stages of

painting.17 The results of Pollock’s first stage of painting resemble huge

black drawings of what might be a figure, much like the black and

white poured “drawings” that he painted primarily between 1951 and

1953. Lee Krasner, his wife, once asked him “why he didn’t stop [a]

painting when a given image was exposed. He said, ‘I choose to veil

the imagery’…With the black-and-whites he chose mostly to expose

the imagery.”18 Although he painted several landscapes in the mid-

1930s, most of his titles refer to humans or animals, and he actually

cut biomorphic figures out of his 1949 overall composition, Out of the

Web (7). This representation of living absence from the painted

environment seems to point again to his life-long search for human

16
Barbara Rose, “Jackson Pollock at Work: An Interview with Lee Krasner,” Partisan Review 47:1 (1980)
in JP, 42-43.
17
Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: the Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” Jackson Pollock (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 119-124.
18
B. H. Friedman, “An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock,” Jackson Pollock: Black and White (New
York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1969) in JP, 36.

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identity in a world dense with experiences and interactions. In Autumn

Rhythm (30) this human figure remains “lost” or “hidden” in the

thicket of sprawling natural colors – sand, forest green, dirt brown and

white – so evocative of a natural landscape.

In the final analysis of Autumn Rhythm (30), Jackson Pollock has

left no statement about its production that clarifies his intentions, nor

has it been the focus of the most critical attention among his works

(such as Full Fathom Five, Lavender Mist or Blue Poles). The truth of

this work’s importance, though, lies in its ability to elude the formal

categories of “the Renaissance tradition” or of the politicizing and

psychologizing “Modern Man discourse” that modern scholars tend to

criticize.19 In fact, more cheap prints of Pollock works are available on

websites like Art.com, than of all the other New York School artists

combined. Autumn Rhythm (30), one can argue, is foremost an

attractive combination of colors, lines and textures (some objects are

embedded in the painting) on a larger-than-life canvas that continues

to communicate powerful emotions to a wide range of viewers. As a

monumental painting poured in fluid swirls, mixed by hand in thick

scumbles, or printed by the tread of the artist’s shoes, this painting

continues to challenge artists to rework the Western tradition of

representation. Secondarily, this painting continues to address modern

19
Leja, 67-68. Although much of this book is revolutionary for Pollock studies, it too easily dismisses the
reception of the artist as strictly delimited by socio-historical concerns. With the passing of time and those
concerns, the growing stream of Pollock studies suggests his larger importance.

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life as an industrial, technological, and scientific condition – albeit

enigmatically. By placing what might have been a biomorphic figure

within Autumn Rhythm (30), as in so many other works, perhaps

Jackson Pollock really did communicate the “inner world” of this age.

After all, the discovery of subjectivity has blossomed with the advent of

Post-modernism, giving Pollock’s hide-and-seek in the wilds of his

unconscious a universal appeal.

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