A web with no center

Stand in front of it, and the first thing the picture does is refuse to be taken in at a glance. It is enormous: about 8 feet 9 inches tall by 17 feet 3 inches wide (a yard taller than a person, and the width of a small room). At that size, standing close, it fills your whole field of vision, edge to edge, with no border of wall to frame it. The work surrounds you, exactly the relation Pollock had to it while he made it, on the floor.

And what fills it is a web: an allover tangle of looping, poured lines in a tight, nearly colorless palette of black, white, brown, and tan, with only a faint trace of teal-blue. There are no strong, saturated hues, no red, no green, and only that one whisper of cool blue against the warm browns. The autumnal browns and creamy buffs carry the warmth, and they are where the later title “Autumn” comes from, though the title was an afterthought. The lines loop and cross and dive under and over one another in rhythmic, layered skeins, laid down in pass after pass until the whole surface hums.

Now try to find the focal point, the place the picture wants your eye to go. You will fail, and the failure is the point. There is no center. Every square inch of the canvas carries roughly equal weight; the top is as busy as the bottom, the left as the right, the corners as the middle. There is no important area and no background area, no near and no far, no climax. Your eye keeps moving and never settles, because there is nowhere built for it to rest. This is what gets called an allover composition: the design spread evenly to all four edges, with the weight distributed everywhere at once. It is one of the most genuinely new things in twentieth-century painting, and you are looking right at it.

Hunt now for a thing: a figure, a face, a horizon, a tree, a window onto any scene at all. There is none. The picture is not of anything. Nothing sits in front of anything else; the usual relationship of a figure standing out against a background (what painters call figure and ground) has collapsed entirely, so that foreground and background are one continuous woven surface. The paint refers only to itself and to the act that put it there. This is the part that is genuinely hard to do in front of an unfamiliar painting, because every instinct trained on five centuries of pictures is to read the marks as something. The instinct is to read them as a thing; there is no thing there to find. The marks are the subject.

So look at the marks as marks, and you can read the physics of how each one was made. The thin, even, trailing lines are where the liquid enamel streamed off a stick held above the canvas. The fatter, propulsive arcs are where it was flung with a snap of the arm. The small dark blots are pools, where paint puddled and dried thick. The fine flecks are spatters, flicked off a loaded brush. Each one is the frozen track of a single movement of his arm or his body, which is why people say the painting is a record of an action: it literally is, mark by mark.

And the gaps repay a look too. Between the skeins you can see the raw, unprimed canvasitself, the pale tan cloth, left bare. That is not a painted background; it is the untouched fabric, doing the job an artist usually fills in. Pollock left it showing on purpose. It means the “ground” of the picture, the thing everything sits on, is the real material of the picture, in plain sight, not an illusion painted over it. The cloth is part of the work, not under it.