Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

A wall of poured and dripped line, almost nine feet tall and over seventeen wide, made on the studio floor from all four sides. No figure, no center, nothing depicted: the subject is the act of painting itself.

1. 1
   The skeins of black, white, brown, tan, and a touch of teal

   Everywhere across the surface, the looping tangle of poured lines

   The whole field is a web of looping lines in a tight, nearly colorless palette: black, white, brown, and a creamy tan, with one faint accent of teal-blue. There are almost no saturated hues; the autumnal browns and buffs are where the later title "Autumn" came from. Trace any one black line and watch it dive under and over the others, and you are reading the order of the layers, the last skeins laid on top of the first.
2. 2
   The rhythm with no center

   The composition as a whole, scanned for a place to rest

   Look for a focal point and there isn’t one. Every region is as busy, and as finished, as every other; there is no top-to-bottom or near-to-far hierarchy, no climax, nowhere for the eye to land. The looping lines set up an even, continuous pulse across the entire field. This is what gets called allover composition: weight spread equally to all four edges, the picture with no middle.
3. 3
   Nothing is depicted

   The whole canvas, searched for a figure, a horizon, a thing

   Hunt for a person, a landscape, an object, a window onto any scene, and you will find none. Nothing sits in front of anything else; foreground and background have collapsed into one continuous woven surface. The picture is not of anything. The paint refers only to itself and to the act that put it there, which is the hardest and most important thing to see in it.
4. 4
   The drips, pools, and spatters

   Throughout, readable up close as the physics of how it was made

   You can read how each mark was made. Thin trailed lines are where paint streamed off a stick; fatter, propulsive arcs are where it was flung; small pools are where it puddled and dried; fine spatters are flicked off a loaded brush. Liquid commercial enamel, house paint, behaving as liquid. Each mark is the frozen track of one movement of his arm or his whole body.
5. 5
   The raw canvas showing through

   In the gaps between the skeins, the bare tan cloth

   The pale tan canvas left exposed between the poured lines is not a painted background. It is the untouched, unprimed cloth itself, doing the job a painted "ground" usually does. Pollock never primed or stretched it before working; that bare fabric is part of the picture, not something hidden under it. Where most paintings bury the canvas, this one leaves it in plain sight.
6. 6
   The scale you stand inside

   The full span of the work, about 8 ft 9 in tall and 17 ft 3 in wide

   At roughly nine feet tall and over seventeen feet wide, the picture fills your whole field of vision when you stand close. The work surrounds you, the way Pollock was surrounded by it on the floor while he made it. The size is doing argumentative work: it puts your body where his was, inside the field rather than in front of a framed view.