The painter who took the canvas off the wall

In the summer of 1950, in a converted barn behind a small farmhouse in Springs, a hamlet at the eastern end of Long Island, New York, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was doing the strangest thing in American painting, which was painting on the floor. He had moved out from New York City a few years earlier with the painter Lee Krasner (when they met the more established of the two, and the one who pulled him into the New York avant-garde and its critics) whom he had married, fixed up the barn as a studio, and arrived at the way of working he is remembered for. He did not stand at an easel. He unrolled a long length of raw, unprimed canvas (plain cloth, never stretched on a frame or sealed with the white primer painters normally lay down first) straight onto the studio floor, and he walked around it.

This was the height of what gets called his drip or pour period, roughly 1947 to 1950, the few years in which he made the pictures he is remembered for. Autumn Rhythm is one of the largest and best of them, made near the end of that run, when he had complete command of the method and had not yet started to doubt it.

To feel why the floor mattered, you have to picture the alternative. For five centuries a Western painter stood in front of a canvas hung upright, the way you stand in front of a window, and worked into a vertical surface at arm’s length, brush in hand. Pollock laid the surface flat and got over it, around it, on every side of it. The picture we are going to look at was made by a man walking around a sheet of canvas on a barn floor, looking down at it, never once stepping back to a wall.

This is the first work in our walk through Abstract Expressionism, the loose group of painters working in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s (Pollock, Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and more) who made the city, for the first time, the center of advanced Western painting, a place that role had always belonged to Paris. They did not share a single style. What they shared was a conviction that a painting could be a direct, unplanned, emotionally charged act rather than a depiction of something out in the world. Pollock’s poured canvases are the most extreme version of that idea, and Autumn Rhythm is one of the clearest.