Poured, flung, and controlled

Start with the material, because the first surprise of Autumn Rhythm is what it is made of. It is not oil paint. The Met records the medium plainly as enamel on canvas, and that means commercial enamel, ordinary house paint, the glossy liquid stuff you would buy in a can to paint a porch railing. Pollock used it because it was cheap, because it poured, and because it dried hard and bright. So when you read “painting” here, picture the consistency of thin syrup, not the buttery paste an oil painter pushes around with a brush.

And he did not push it around with a brush, not in the usual sense. He poured and flung it, straight from the can or trailed off the end of a stick, a hardened dried-out brush, a basting syringe, or a trowel, holding the tool above the canvas and letting the liquid fall. The paint drips, streams, pools, and spatters onto the cloth under its own weight and the speed of his arm.

Because the canvas was flat on the floor, he could move all the way around it and work from all four sides, with no fixed up or down, no top edge, no bottom. The finished picture records the motion of his whole body moving over and around the surface, walking, crouching, stepping back in, rather than the small motion of a hand at an easel.

He wrote down why, three years earlier, in a short statement called “My Painting” for the little one-issue magazine Possibilities(no. 1, Winter 1947–48). It is the cleanest thing he ever said about the method, and it is the key to everything in this picture:

My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor…

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

That phrase is the whole program: literally be in the painting. Not in front of it, looking at a scene through it. Inside it, standing where the marks land. (The statement runs on into the often-quoted line that follows: “When I am inmy painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing… the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”)

The picture is often dismissed as a random splatter, paint thrown at a canvas by chance. It is not. Pollock denied exactly this, on the record. In an interview with William Wright in the summer of 1950 (the same year he made Autumn Rhythm), he insisted he controlled the pour. The most-quoted form of what he said is a compressed one:

“I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.”

(That punchy sentence is a condensation of a longer passage in the transcript, where he said that with experience it is possible to control the flow of paint to a great extent, and that he denied the accident. It is fairly quoted as his statement on control, just not a single unbroken sentence.) The point stands either way. He had spent years learning how a given height of pour, a given speed of arm, a given thickness of paint would land. The photographer Hans Namuth, who shot more than 500 photographs and two short films of Pollock at work in 1950–51, left a record that scholars have used to reconstruct the order of the layers in Autumn Rhythm: the build was deliberate and methodical, laid in over months, not flung down in a fit. (The films caught Pollock mid-pour and did as much as anything to fix the public image of him as a painter of pure action, though, tellingly, the famous color one shows him working on glass, not on this canvas.) Call it controlled, or choreographed. Do not call it accidental.

It is tempting to picture all this arriving from nowhere, a man alone in a barn inventing a new art. Pouring and dripping paint was not itself new; he had seen it done. Pollock had worked in the New York workshop of the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1936, where artists dripped and poured industrial paint in what they called “controlled accidents.” He had watched Navajo sand-painters build an image flat on the ground, working it from all sides, his own “literally be in the painting” nods straight at them. He had absorbed the Surrealists’ automatism (letting the hand move before the mind catches up) and Cubism’s flat, edge-to-edge field. And in the mid-1940s the critic Clement Greenberg credited the allover drip canvases of Janet Sobel as a direct influence on Pollock. What was his own was the leap to scale, and to making the moving body the method and the subject at once.

Two careful notes, because the legends crowd in fast here. First, you will see the phrase “action painting” attached to Pollock as if it were his word. It was not. The critic Harold Rosenberg coined it in “The American Action Painters,” an essay in ARTnews in December 1952, two years after this canvas was made; it is a label the critics put on the work, not a thing Pollock said while painting it. Second, you will see the line “I am nature” quoted as Pollock’s manifesto. That one is anecdotal, remembered second-hand by Lee Krasner long afterward, with no contemporary document behind it. It is a nice story, but it is hearsay, and we are not going to lean a reading of the painting on it.