Number 30 becomes Autumn Rhythm

One thing to clear up before anything else, because the title misleads almost everyone: this painting is not a picture of autumn. It does not depict a season, or anything else. And it did not begin life with that name. When Pollock first showed it, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in late 1950, and again at the Museum of Modern Art’s 15 Americans show in 1952, it was simply Number 30. From 1947 on, Pollock numbered his pictures instead of naming them, precisely so a title would not tell you what to see or impose a meaning the paint did not contain.

The lyrical title Autumn Rhythm attached only later, by the time of the Sidney Janis Gallery show in 1955. (Some scholars argue the poetic title was Pollock’s own choice; the exact circumstances of the renaming are not pinned to a document, so it is fairest to say the painting was later retitled, not that Pollock sat down and named it in 1955.) Either way, the warm browns and tans that earned it the word “Autumn” were already on the canvas; the name came afterward, to a picture that was never of a season at all.

Pollock did not have long after this. The drip pictures of 1947–50 were the peak; the years after were harder, with more drinking and less work. On 11 August 1956, driving near his home in Springs, drunk, he crashed his car and was killed, at the age of forty-four. He had become famous in his own lifetime, splashed across magazines as the wild American painter, but he never made anything that surpassed the canvases of those three or four years, and he never sold most of them for much.

A year after his death, in 1957, Autumn Rhythm entered The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met’s curator Robert Beverly Hale arranged the purchase from Pollock’s estate (the price is reported at around $20,000 plus a trade of another Pollock, a figure that is well-sourced but secondary), and it came in through the museum’s George A. Hearn Fund, accession number 57.92. It has hung at the Met ever since, one of the defining American paintings of the century, on permanent view in New York.

And the label everyone uses for it, “action painting,” only really stuck after the man himself was gone, coined by Harold Rosenberg in 1952 and cemented over the decade that followed. It fits the picture better than most labels fit most pictures: a canvas that is, genuinely, the frozen record of an action. But it arrived from outside, from a critic, after the fact. Pollock’s own word for what he did was plainer. He said he wanted to be in the painting. Stand close to the seventeen-foot web of black and tan and white, with no center and no edge to hold onto, and you can feel what he meant.