Voiceover: Three years prior to the making of this
painting, Pollock was working on a small easel painting.
He had struggled on it for a while, and he decided to take
that painting off the easel, place it on the floor, and then
pour some paint on the surface to finish it.
>From this deceptively simple decision, an entire set
of creative possibilities opened up to Pollock, and he
spent the next five years of his career exploring them.
Now, in the studio, let's see exactly how Pollock worked.
Placing the canvas on the floor, Pollock no longer remained
in physical contact with the canvas while painting.
Instead of using conventional artist brushes to push
or smear liquid paint across the surface of the painting,
Pollock now used things like sticks, even turkey
basters or dried paint brushes, hard as a rock,
that he variously dripped, drizzled, poured,
or splashed paint onto the canvas below him from.
Pollock used very fluid alkyd enamel paints,
the kind of paint you could paint your car with,
the kind of paint you could paint your radiator with.
Because the paint was so fluid, Pollock essentially
drew in space, so that drawing elements would
happen quite literally in the air, before falling down
to the canvas below, sometimes thick, sometimes thin.
A rhythm of poured paint would develop
across the surface of the painting.
Now, if you know that the painting was painted
on the floor, if you know that the paint has
a very low viscosity, you can very easily imagine
the kind of physical activities that would go into
the making of this type of painting.
Art historians, at the time, coined this kind
of painting, action painting, because of this very
idea that you could imagine quite viscerally
the actions that went into the making of the painting.
Now, specifically, we're talking about
the actions of almost a dancer.
You can imagine Pollock's feet
shuffling around the painting.
You can imagine rotations of the elbow
and of the shoulder, variously launching
or slowly drizzling paint onto the canvas below.
For Pollock, the drama of making this painting
on the floor meant that not only physically but
emotionally he could be in the painting, stepping
into the canvas, but also losing himself in almost
this trance-like or zone-like type of painting process.
Looking at the paint below you on the surface
of the canvas, reacting to it, and adjusting
whatever gestures you have to create this painting.
Now, traditionally in painting, people would
compose one shape according to another one.
A little bit of red here, according to a little bit
of blue there, according to a lot of yellow over here.
Well, for Pollock, he threw that
out the window, as he did so many things.
Rather, Pollock is composing one line in juxtaposition
with another one, and not in any haphazard way,
but rather in an all over way, and this all-overness,
if you will, becomes key for Pollock.
Since looking at this painting, there's no
one spot for your eye to rest.
Traditionally, line had been used quite literally
to delineate forms, to draw the outlines
of forms, which would be filled in.
You can imagine landscape paintings.
The lines define the mountains, clouds, and so on.
Well, here the line is not defining anything.
Line becomes here autonomous, and for the first time
is liberated from its historical role in
painting of describing other shapes.
In 1950, the drama of making this painting was
actually captured by a photographer and film maker,
so that the performance of making this painting
captured the public's imagination as never before.
Not only that, but other artists were profoundly
influenced by this radically new way of working,
not only painters, but, well, performance artists
can be traced back to this very very formative
moment, very important moment in American art history.