Jackson Pollock's Classic Paintings: Threading the Camusian Void

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Jackson Pollock’s Classic Paintings: Threading the Camusian Void
William F. Birdsall
October 1, 2018
Figure 1. Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31. 1950. Museum of Modern Art. New York, New
York, United States.

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Figure 2. Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912- August 11, 1956)
Figure 3. Albert Camus (November 7, 1913- January 4, 1960)
I Jackson Pollock: Painter of the Absurd

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Figure 4. Evergreen Review. Volume 1, No. 3, 1957. Hans Namuth. “Portrait of
Jackson Pollock.” 1952. Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States. Gift of
photographer.
The cover of the American avant-garde literary magazine Evergreen Review, volume 1, number
3, 1957, is a striking photograph of the American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock (Figure
4). The Evergreen Review cover also reveals the lead article of the issue is by the renowned French
novelist, playwright, and essayist Albert Camus (“Reflections on the Guillotine”; Camus, 1957, 5-55.
Figure 3). The international reputation of these two men was well established. Pollock, killed August,
1956, (when drunk he drove his car off the road), was recognized as the most innovative painter of the
post-war World War II era in both the United States and Europe (Figure 2). Camus was awarded the
1957 Noble Prize for Literature; at age 44 the second youngest author to receive it. Their visages widely

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appeared in the American popular and cultural press as Existentialist icons of the cultural scene; icons
that would extend into the twenty-first century. A 2004 commentary by authors Mark Stevens and
Annalyn Swan on a famous photo of Pollock, published in the August 18, 1949, issue of the widely read
Life magazine, conflates the image of Pollock with Camus: “A cigarette hung from his lips. Posed in
front of a long horizontal work called Summertime, Pollock looked the dark, brooding angel of art: the
painting flared out from him like wings. … Existential ideas were being transformed into a popular
romance. In the photograph, Pollock could almost have been the French writer Albert Camus, a
Gauloise dangling from his lip” (Stevens and Swan, 2004, 283. Figure 5). However, Camus was not an
Existentialist and Pollock had only a vague idea of what Existentialism’s relationship to painting might
be (On Camus see Lottman, 1997; on Pollock see Naifeh and Smith, 1989).

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Figure 5. “Jackson Pollock: Is the greatest living painter in the united States?” Life, August 18, 1949.
Camus was typically seen as an Existentialist because of his close personal association in the
1940s with Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French Existentialist philosopher; however, both agreed Camus
was not an Existentialist. In a 1945 interview entitled “No, I am not an existentialist…,” Camus
claimed sardonically that “Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. We have even
thought of publishing a short statement in which the undersigned declare that they have nothing in
common with each other and refuse to be held responsible for the debts they might respectively incur”
(Camus, 1970, 345). As Ronald Aronson demonstrated in his study of the Camus/Sartre relationship,
Camus was a novelist who wrote philosophy; Sartre a philosopher who wrote novels (Aronson, 2004).

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Indeed, in the English language 1955 edition of The Myth of Sisyphus, published initially in France in
1942, Camus made clear that at the beginning that “The pages that follow deal with absurd sensitivity
that can be found widespread in the age—and not with an absurd philosophy which our time, properly
speaking, has not known” (Camus, 1955, 2. Emphasis added).
Although Sartre and Camus both wrote about the absurdity of life, Camus had a more positive
view of human nature and the pleasures of the human life experience. Fundamentally Camus’s absurd
ideas rejected the nihilism of Sartre’s Existentialism. Sartre did not embrace the physical world and its
pleasures while Camus wrote extensively about the beauty of nature and lived life to the fullest as
novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist, political activist, World War II member of the resistance, public
intellectual, and stereotypical Mediterranean lover of women. Throughout his life and writings Camus
“sought only reasons to transcend our darkest nihilism” (Camus, 1970, 160). In The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus identified the dilemma presented to every person: the absurd confrontation with an unfathomable
world and a person’s need for a sense of order and unity to fill the resulting void in their life (Camus,
1955). Arising out of the feeling of exile in a silent world is a person’s confrontation with a sense of
their personal void, “that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark
back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like
fire” (Camus, 1991, 71).
Jackson Pollock had his own Camusian void to confront and, as his life could not be separated
from art, the only way he could fill the void was through his painting. Pollock’s successful
confrontation with his void led to his greatest achievement, the classic all –over drip paintings of 1947-
1950 (See section X A Selection of Jackson Pollock Classic Paintings ). Successfully transforming the
anxiety embodied in the void into the complex imagery of the classic paintings, made Pollock not an
Existentialist painter but the painter of the absurd. But what was it about Pollock the man and artist that

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led to his success with classic paintings? Camus enumerated a set of traits he expected a great artist to
display as a person and in their art. Following Pollock’s experimentation to find an imagery with which
to confront the void reveals the Camusian traits that led to his success. Although it was not their
intention, evidence of these traits can be discovered in the analyses of art historians, critics, curators, and
biographers of Pollock’s personality, methods and works of art. Published commentary by Pollock
himself, his wife Lee Krasner Pollock, and others provide further evidence confirming the value of
Camus’s insights in understanding Jackson Pollock’s achievement.
How can the ideas of Camus the writer be applied to Pollock the painter? Camus believed in the
unity of all the arts; writers, painters, architects, composers, actors, musicians are all united as artists.
Camus certainly considered himself as both writer and artist. Writing to another author, Camus stated:
I advance with the same steps, it seems to me, as an artist and as a man. And this is not preconceived. It
is a faith I have, in all humility, in my vocation….My future books won’t turn away from the problem of
the hour. But I would like them to subjugate it rather than be subjugated by it. In other words I dream of
a freer creation, with the same contents….Then I will know if I am a true artist (Camus, 2010b, 35.
Deletions in the original`).
Camus’s short story, Jonas, or The Artist at Work, is about an artist whose life is completely upset by his
success and the resulting adverse pressures of the competitive Parisian cultural scene. The story is
considered Camus’s most autobiographical work; yet, Jonas is not a writer but a painter (Camus, 2007,
87-123. Emphasis added). Clearly, the traits Camus considered characteristic of great artists can be
applied to both the visual and literary arts.
Art critic Michael Fried asserts that the common characterization of Pollock as some kind of
“natural existentialist” obscures that Pollock was “a painter whose work is always inhabited by a subtle,
questing formal intelligence of the highest order, and whose concern in his art was not with any

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fashionable metaphysics of despair but with making the best paintings of which he was capable” (Fried,
1998, 222-223). Pollock’s paintings of his classic period are graphic evidence of his success in filling
his void and of leaving a successful record of universal beauty and hope that others can access. In a
handwritten statement Pollock asserted that “Technique is the result of a need” (Pollock, Undated, 24).
In the all-over drip paintings Pollock found the technique to meet his need to fill the void. He was so
successful in transforming his personal void into imagery so unique to himself that, as Evelyn Toynton
correctly observes: “Other painters made use of the techniques he had pioneered, adapting them for their
own ends, but nobody found a way to a step farther down the path he had forged” (Toynton, 2012, 114).
Nonetheless, painters still return to Pollock. The prominent post-Pollock abstract painter Frank Stella
reached the conclusion: “It is amazing that Pollock’s accomplishment, so universally felt, has provided
so much confusion and produced such unsure results [from subsequent artists]. Still, we know that we
need to use Pollock” (Stella, 1986, 60).
Camus asserted that “the great work of art has less importance in itself than the ordeal it
demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a
little closer to his naked reality” (Camus, 1955, 115). Pollock’s life was exactly this Camusian assertion;
through his art overcoming his phantoms and bringing himself closer to his naked reality. Albert Camus
defined the absurdist void; Jackson Pollock painted it.
This essay consists of the following sections: I Jackson Pollock: Painter of the Absurd; II The
Camusian Void; III Jackson Pollock’s Void; IV The Turn to Lucidity; VI In the Void: The Classic
Paintings; VII Threading the Void; VIII Out of the Void; IX With the Void, Full Powers to Albert Camus,
Jackson Pollock, and Yves Klein.; X A selection of Jackson Pollock Classic Paintings; XI Works Cited.
II Confronting the Camusian Void

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In all the arts a fundamental challenge is how to represent the reality of an unfathomable world.
An artist’s representation of reality must be in the context of the Camusian absurd; the absurd being a
person’s longing for a sense of order and unity, while confronted by a silent world. There is a yearning
for a cohesive narrative of one’s life in the face of a world of dissonance, opaqueness, and endless
contradictions that defies rational explanation; “That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute
illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama” (Camus, 1955, 17). This ambiguity is a source of
anxiety; that sensation of a void. Indeed, “There is not one human being who, above a certain
elementary level of consciousness, does not exhaust himself in trying to find formulas or attitudes that
will give his existence the unity it lacks” (Camus, 1956, 262). Confronting the absurd demands saying
yes to life and no to death. A person’s rebellion against death “Amounts to claiming that life has a
meaning, to fighting for order and unity” (Camus, 1956, 101).
The artist confronts the contradictions of the absurd “the mind projects into the concrete its
spiritual tragedy…by means of a perpetual paradox which confers on colors the power to express the
void and on daily gestures the strength to translate eternal ambitions” (Camus, 1955, 126). In short, the
artist of the absurd “must give the void its colors” (Camus, 1955, 114). Art provides a means for the
artist and beholder to confront the void: “Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of
absurdity in the different but closely related worlds of intelligence, of the art of living, or of art itself”
(Camus, 1955, 12, Emphasis added). Indeed, Camus equates life with art when he asserts: “It takes time
to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about” (Camus, 1972, 74). When Camus calls
upon the artist’s use of colors and gestures to confront the challenge of the void he is foretelling the
essence of the success of the imagery and beauty Jackson Pollock achieved with the classic pictures.
As confronting the absurd void is the context of the act of artistic creation, the driving impulse of
“Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world” (Camus, 1956, 253). And as

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finding unity in the world impossible, artists must strive to create, “after their own fashion …a substitute
universe” (Camus, 1956, 255). It is out of this objective that “The artist reconstructs the world to his
plan” (Camus, 1956, 255). However, the artist cannot completely reject reality; “Art is neither complete
negation nor complete acceptance of what is” (Camus, 1960, 264). As a result “The artist constantly
lives in such a state of ambiguity, incapable of negating the real and yet eternally bound to question it in
its eternally unfinished aspects” (Camus, 1960, 264). In this way the duality of reality and of art is
resolved: “Art disputes reality, but does not hide from it” (Camus, 1956, 258). Achieving the objective
of conveying a sense of unity through the creation of a distinct world through an artist’s unique image
making is a distinguishing feature of a great artist.
How can an artist create a distinct reality? Camus argues that if an artist abandons reality
entirely the result is pure abstraction cut off from the world. If the artist attempts an image replicating
the natural world the result is a crude realism. Reality must be discovered by the lucid intellect
discerning a more genuine knowledge of life experiences concealed by everyday life. Camus
understood the importance of emotion in life: “We insist that the part of man which cannot be reduced
to mere ideas should be taken into consideration—the passionate side of his nature that serves no other
purpose than to be part of the act of living” (Camus, 1956, 19). However, while there “are facts the
heart can feel, yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect” (Camus, 1955, 3).
The application of a lucid intellect over emotion by the artist is paramount for successful art: “It is
necessary to state this to begin with. For … a work of art to be possible, thought in its most lucid form
must be involved in it” (Camus, 1955, 97). It is through lucid thought artists pierce daily illusions and
their contradictions: “To think is first of all to create a world” (Camus, 1955, 99).
The artist and the beholder of a work of art share a bond through the exercise of their individual
passion subject to the exercise of their lucid intelect. “The loftiest work [of art] will always be,”

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according to Camus, “as in the Greek Tragedies, Melville, Tolstoy, or Moliere, the work that maintains
an equilibrium between reality and man’s rejection of that reality, each forcing the other upward in a
ceaseless overflowing, characteristic of life itself at its most joyous and heart-rending extremes”
(Camus, 1960, 265). It is then for the beholder that “a new world appears, different from the everyday
world and yet the same, particular but universal, full of innocent insecurity—called forth for a few hours
by the power and longing of genius” (Camus, 1960, 265). This is the means whereby the arts can shape
how a person experiences reality and achieves a new sense of freedom and unity in the world. The
successful artist reveals “a reality we recognize without ever having known it,” thereby achieve a
harmony in confronting the void (Camus, 1960, 265).
In the struggle to break through everyday reality “The mind’s first step is to distinguish what is
true from what is false. However, as soon as thought reflects on itself, what it first discovers is
contradiction” (Camus, 1955, 16). Life experiences involve choices large and small between life and
death, freedom and servitude, the individual and society, love and hate, expression and silence, order and
chaos, violence and non-violence, unity and diversity, solitude and solidarity, liberty and oppression,
means and ends, and so on. How should the choice between contradictions be resolved? A person
accepts their relative positions: “Divided between the relative and the absolute,” the mind “leaps eagerly
into the relative” (Camus, 2010a, 46). In doing so a person follows a “law of moderation” by rejecting
absolutist, abstract values represented by each pole (Camus, 1956, 295). The poles of contradictions
define each other; there cannot be one without the other. The value of one pole is determined through an
analysis of its relative value to the other, thereby establishing the limits of the contradiction. A person
must insure that finding a point between the contradictory poles does not itself become an absolutist
position; it is a point of flexible equilibrium that will from time-to-time have to be shifted between the
absolutist extremes. Inherent to this flexibility is the ambiguity that must be endured. In his notebook

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Camus wrote: “Moderation. They consider it the resolution of contradiction. It cannot be anything other
than the affirmation of contradiction and the heroic decision to stay with it and to survive it” (Camus,
2010b, 21). Holding a position that avoids the extremes is not a weak compromise; it is a position of
constructive strength that holds the balance between the destructive absolutism of extreme positions. In
all contradictions there is this underlying unity. It is a matter of learning to “braid with white thread
and black thread a single cord stretched to breaking point” (Camus, 1955, 202. Emphasis added).
The application of a lucid intellect faces a constant challenge: habit. People fill their days with
habit as a defense against life’s disorder, habit that also can narrow perception of the world. Camus
acknowledges “Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by
existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit” (Camus, 1955, 5). Consequently, “We get into
the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking,” thereby failing to see the genuine reality that
underlies our daily lives (Camus, 1955, 8). In the desire for unity and order in the world, habit of
thought and behaviour buffer consciousness from the chaos of life, tampers anxiety, and provides a sense
of control. But this state is neither freedom nor confronting reality; habit is a screen between
consciousness and reality. The creative work of art breaks through the screen of the habits of mind and
perception we accrue throughout our days and, in doing so, engenders in a person their own creativity
and exercise of freedom. Camus’s explanation of the artist and the absurd embodies the traits expected
to be found in great artists and their work.
The Camusian traits can be summarized as follows. The artists and their art are one. There
being for everyone a human need for unity and order when confronted by the void of an unfathomable
universe, the role of the artist is to confront the void of a silent universe through the creation of their
own distinct universe, thereby contributing to human freedom. The creation of this distinct universe is
achieved through application of lucid intellect to the artist’s life experience as transformed through their

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art. By not rejecting life experience but drawing upon it to create a distinct reality the artist neither
replicates accepted perceptions of reality nor resorts to a pure abstraction that ignores the general
perceptions of reality. The artist breaks through habitual modes of perception, revealing to the
consciousness of the beholder a deeper perception of reality. The contradictions encountered in
confronting the void are resolved through the law of moderation; rejecting absolutes, braiding the cord
between contradictory poles with black and white thread. The successful artist reveals “a reality we
recognize without ever having known it,” thereby achieving an inner harmony in confronting the void
(Camus, 1960, 265).
III Jackson Pollock’s void
In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus asserted the fundamental question of philosophy is “Judging
whether life is or is not worth living” (Camus, 1955, 3). For both Camus and Pollock a life of art was
the only life worth living. From an early age Pollock began to explore art as a means to create who he
was to be, a commitment that lasted to the end of his life; in 1956, the last year of his life, he declared at
the age of 44: “Every good artist paints what he is” (Seldon quoted in Landau, 119). Pollock’s
biographers record:
Ultimately, painting was the only way Jackson Pollock could appease the demons that tormented him. In
the veil of paint, he could conceal himself, and in the celebrity that followed, satisfy his hunger for
attention; he could best his brothers and command his parents’ love. In the end paining was a way to test
the world, to probe its heart, and to make it suffer forgiveness (Naifeh and Smith, 1989, 8).
When a teenager he began taking art classes at the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School. At 18, he
moved to New York City where he enrolled in the Art Students League to study under the Regionalist
artist Thomas Hart Benton. He already recognized his life and art as one experience. At age 20 he

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wrote his mother that “Painting and sculpturing is life itself (that is for those who practice it) and one
advances as one grows and experiences life” (Rubin,1999b, 257).
Pollock believed that not only are artists and their art one but that their art is literally within
themselves, that artists and their art is such “that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter
outside themselves. Most modern painters work from a difference source. They work from within”
(Wright, 1999, 20). Artists are “working and expressing an inner world…expressing the energy, the
motion, and other inner forces” (Wright, 1999, 21). For Pollock the inner forces was the unconscious,
the source of his art. He was asked: “Would it be true to say that the artist is painting from the
unconscious, and the canvas must act as the unconscious of the person who views it?” He replied: “The
unconscious is a very important side of modern art and I think the unconscious drives do mean a lot in
looking at paintings’ (Wright, 1991, 20). Turning to the unconscious as a principle source of his art he
confronted early on the need to make order and unity out of the chaos of his life, to fill the Camusian
void within. Only then would be possible to achieve a degree of harmony and freedom, that, “magical
state after which he had always yearned: total involvement, release, and self-transformation ritually
induced in the process of making art” (Landau, 1989, 182). He wrote to his father “the art of life is
composition—the planning—the fitting of masses—of activities…I’ve got a long way to go yet towards
my development—much that needs working on—doing everything with a definite purpose. Without
purpose for each move, there’s chaos” (Rubin, 1999b, 231).
Historian of modern American art and Pollock exhibition curator Sam Hunter captures the
oneness of Pollock and his art and challenge of the void:
The drama of his life and of his art was their indivisibility; he lived his painting intensely, with a complete
absorption, and he painted his life, especially in an early style when he made his own tormented
individualism the theme and substance of his art. The problem of painting was identified in a total way in

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his mind with the problem of existence. In neither were easy solutions admissible. Happening when it
did, death may have come as a deliverance from the deep mental anguish of paralyzing spiritual crisis
(Hunter, 1956, 6).
In 1952, the critic Harold Rosenberg published his essay about “The American Action Painters” in
which he vividly captured “the artists and their art as one” ethos when he stated that the act of painting
“is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down
every distinction between life and art” (Rosenberg, 1960, 28). He later claimed Jackson Pollock was his
archetypical action painter (Kleeblatt, 2008, 37).
Many people turn to spiritual and secular belief systems for some fulfillment of their void;
Pollock himself explored the writings of Krishnamurti, the Theosophical movement, and Jungian
psychoanalysis. He did encounter though his intellectual explorations the extent of contradictions in life
and belief systems; between life and death, love and hate, solitude and solidarity, fame and obscurity,
success and failure. But Pollock had to meet the challenge of the void’s contradicitons through his art.
Pollock scholars have noted his early paintings were “engaged with the union of opposites—male and
female, sun and moon, full and crescent shapes” in an effort to reach some level of emotional stability
(Lewison, 1999, 16). However, Pollock could not find the imagery he needed outside himself; it would
have to be from within. He could not paint an illusionistic outer reality of traditional art but only the
inner reality of his own unconscious which, being uniquely his, could only be an unique imagery. By
looking within himself Pollock found a means to confront the need to find unity and order in the chaotic
world he experienced. William Rubin correctly observes that “Pollock intuited very early the analogy,
the profound and mysterious inter-connection, between giving order to one’s pictures and to one’s life”
(Rubin, 1999b, 231).

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Figure 6. Jackson Pollock. Untitled Self-Portrait. 1930-1933. The Pollock-
Krasner Foundation Inc.
From an early age Pollock’s personal world was chaotic. He was introduced to drinking alcohol
at the age of 15, thereby finding one means to deal with his personal phantoms, at least for a time. About
the same time, when he started sketching, he discovered art was another means. In his early twenties he
painted a self-portrait that, as one biographer characterizes it, accurately captures “the feeling of
isolation and anguish” experienced by Pollock as a young man (Landau, 1989, 32. Figure 6). By 1937,
at the age of twenty-five he underwent his first psychiatric treatment. The next year he entered a
hospital for a number of months to be treated for severe alcoholism. In 1939, he entered into
psychoanalysis. Throughout life he continued to struggle with depression, alcoholism, sexual anxiety, a
domineering mother, marital issues, and the inherent stresses of sustaining the creative artistic output of

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a genius. The standard biography of Pollock records his struggles to achieve through his art a sense of
order out of a chaotic world and to confront the void within himself:
His life was a give and take, giving a small piece of himself—often inadvertently—then desperately
trying to reclaim it—or obliterate it. Give and take. The world demanded that he give; the demons
demanded that he take back. In his art, he concealed his images within layers of paint, systematically
weaving them into an impenetrable web of lines and dribbles, spills and drips. Show and conceal; give
and take. He veiled his art just as he veiled his life, to protect himself from the world without and the
terrors within (Naifeh and Smith, 1989, 4).
Acquaintances and experts have sensed a void within Pollock. The painter George McNeil
claimed “There was always emptiness about Jackson, like living in an abyss; you could feel it in the way
he talked, in the way he looked. It was as if he came from nowhere and fell from nowhere” (Potter,
1985, 34). The art dealer Betty Parson, an early supporter of Pollock, believed “He could be such a
horror, but he was a good guy basically. It was just that he had a power, a force inside, that disturbed
him. He had integrity and he was very attractive, but disturbed—oh, very” (Potter, 1985, 108.Emphasis
added). Sam Hunter saw Pollock’s struggle in his paintings with the contradictions inherent to the void:
“Pollock always saw the painting field as an arena of conflict and strife, on which, according to the stage
of his stylistic evolution, recognizable forms or abstract configurations were locked in violent combat.
Each picture became the representation in the play of contending forces” (Hunter, 1956, 9).
In his early work Pollock drew on many sources for stylistic techniques and ways to fill the void:
Surrealism, American Indian art, Jungian psychology, Indian Theosophist Pantheism, classical
mythology, alchemy, American regionalism painting, Renaissance art, Mexican muralists, artists
including El Greco (1541-1614),Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Albert Bingham Ryder (1847-1917),
Pablo Picasso 1881-1972, Juan Miro (1893-1983), and Thomas Hart Benton (1899-1975). His painting
were crammed with a confused profusion of quasi-abstract and symbolic imagery; chaos rather than

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order and unity (Figure 7). This derived imagery did not meet his need to represent his own encounter
with the void. However, the ambiguous frenetic swirls, obscure markings, and ambiguous symbolism
covering the canvas edge to edge are signs of Pollock’s need for a freer form of imagery of his own
creation. T. J. Clark correctly observes: “Perhaps it was true that an imagery of rage had proved itself
unworkable in the end, the picture space stuffed to the point of ludicrousness with shrieking, plangent
bits and pieces of emotion, each buttonholing the view and talking at once.” What was needed was
“Some kind of balance” (Clark, 1999, 321). Pollock was approaching a crucial point in his artistic
development when he would achieve “some kind of balance”—the product of lucidity over passion.
Figure 7. Jackson Pollock. Pasiphae. 1943. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, New
York, United States.
Camus declared: “the world is nothing and the world is everything—this is the contradictory and
tireless cry of every true artist, the cry that keeps him on his feet with eyes ever open and that, every

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once in a while, awakens for all in this world asleep the fleeting and insistent image of a reality we
recognize without ever having known it” (Camus, 1960, 265). Pollock’s life and art was manifested in
the need to achieve order within his void, of creating that “reality we recognize without ever having
known it.” Pollock’s life was a struggle to overcome his phantoms in order to fill the void with the
creation of his own reality distinct from that of the generally perceived world. To achieve that goal
required of him a turn to greater lucidity.
IV The Turn to Lucidity: Painting Mural
Figure 8 . Jackson Pollock before Mural blank canvas, 1943. Bernard Schadt, Photogrpaher. Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
A significance advance towards finding an imagery for fulfilling his void was made by Pollock
with the creation of the 1943 painting Mural, which at 19 feet long by just over 8 feet high, was his
largest painting up to that time (Figure 9). The drama of Pollock’s challenge is captured in a
photograph of him standing in his apartment before the huge blank canvas (Figure 8). Leonhard
Emmerling reflects the spirit of the common Pollock legend: “The photo of the painter standing alone,
exhausted and phantom-like before his overwhelming, yet –to-be finished work would become the

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quintessential image of the artist working on the verge of existential despair” (Emmerling 2003, 8-9).
The photo is not an Existential artist in despair but Pollock the Absurdist painter on the verge of taking a
dramatic step toward filling his absurd void through the lucid experimental discovery of the techniques
making possible the ultimate creation of the classic paintings.
Figure 9. Jackson Pollock. Mural. 1943. University of Iowa Museum of Art. University of Iowa.
Iowa City. United States.
The painting was commissioned by the wealthy art collector and Pollock dealer Peggy
Guggenheim for her New York townhouse. After contemplating the blank canvas for almost six
months, Pollock was stymied how to proceed. Finally, Guggenheim told him he had to install the
painting before January, 1944. A common story is that at nightfall before the day it was due to be
delivered he began to paint in a frenzy through the night, painting in a Western stampede of figures
across the canvas, successively painting over with yet new figures, all of which was overlaid with
swirling lines of various colors. Unfilled spaces were then filled in with white paint. “Finally, under
splatters of yellow and red, the last fragments of recognizable images disappeared. Nothing remained of
the original stampede except furious energy, panoramic chaos, and primal alarm….For the first time …

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Jackson had pushed the image beyond representation, beyond scrutiny, beyond the veil ” (Naifeh and
Smith, 1989, 468).
Kirk Varnedoe captures the dramatic importance of this painting for modern art when he states:
“for a moment in January, when he put down the brush after the concentrated hours moving back and
forth across the twenty feet of Mural, and painting from the floor to as high as his reach would stretch,
this man stood alone at the head of the class, not just in New York but internationally…. There was
nothing of this power and originality being made anywhere else in the war-plagued world that dim
winter.” (Varnedoe, Quoted in Emmerling, 2003, 9). For Pollock it signalled the embarking on
technical and stylistic advances that lead to the conquest of the void in the classic period. Fellow
abstract expressionist artist Robert Motherwell claimed: “Probably the catalytic moment in [Pollock’s]
art was the day he painted the mural…Dancing around the room, he finally found a way of painting that
fitted him, and from then on he developed that technique and that scale” (Friedman, 1972, 63).
The large painting for Peggy Guggenheim was to serve as a mural in her apartment hall and
Pollock deliberately gave it the title Mural. Like other artists at that time he was intrigued with the idea
of painting murals, stating in an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship: “I believe the easel picture to
be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall or picture mural…. The pictures
I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the
future, without arriving there completely” (Pollock, 1999a, 17). In addition to its large size Mural
displays other characteristics that would be developed further in the classic paintings: an all-over
composition lacking the traditional directing of the beholder to a specific center of attention; a dynamic
rhythm enveloping the entire painting consisting of a variety of gestures; various means in the
application of paint in a variety of colors and densities. As well, while the painting started out with a
figurative reference to a western stampede it ended as a fully abstract painting. These variations

22
attracted the beholder’s close examination of the painting “but at a distance all of these separate effects
are neutralized and blend together in a cohesive homogeneous structure” ( Cernuschi, 1992, 87). And,
while the painting reflects remnants of Jean Miro’s all-over compositions and Surrealist linear imagery,
“many advocates of this new art would quickly construe it as uniquely American” (Balken, 2005, 11).
Evelyn Toynton identifies its relevance to the later paintings: “It does not refer to anything outside itself.
Like the great drip paintings Pollock would make later on, it simple is itself” (Toyton, 2012, 38.
Emphasis in the original).
The painting is a significant step in Pollock’s effort to find an imagery with which to fill his void
and, as such, it displays further evidence of the traits Camus sought in great artists, most fundamentally
the emphasis on rational lucidity. While the painting was evidently painted at a frenetic pace in one
night it was the result of an extended period of serious contemplation; that is, the result of the
application of a lucid intellect moving towards the creation of “a reality we recognize without ever
having known it.” Peter Gay, in his assessment of Pollock in the history of modernism asserts: “Pollock
himself insisted that the roots of his art were profoundly personal. The true source of his inspiration, he
said, was the unconscious. But, despite his record of undergoing some Jungian analysis and finding the
Jungian rather than the Freudian atmosphere truly congenial, students of Pollock’s art failed to reach a
consensus on just how much of his painting stemmed from the unconscious pressures, how much of it
from a deliberate, conscious practice.” (Gay, 2008, 461). The answer is that it is both: sourcing the
unconscious, applying a lucid intellect. In Pollock, William Rubin captures the tension between chaos
and order, between the unconscious and the conscious: “The tension at the outset, for example, between
the freely invented local passages and the diagrammatic binding geometries that often hold them in
place suggest a conflict in the artist himself between his instinct for maximum liberty, for an

23
improvisational freedom that just skirts chaos, and his contrary need for an absolute, sometimes a priori
[rational] order” (Rubin, 1999b, 232)
Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner Pollock, astutely responded to the general belief Pollock painted as
if driven by emotional outpouring: “I go on the assumption that the serious artist is a highly sensitive,
intellectual and aware human being, and when he or she ‘pours it out’ it isn’t just a lot of gushy, dirty
emotion. It is a total of the experiences which have to do with being a painter and an aware human
being. The painter’s way of expressing himself is through painting not through verbal ideas, but that
doesn’t preclude the presence of highly intellectual concepts. The painter is not involved in a battle with
the intellect” (Glaser, 1999, 28). She speaks specifically of the importance of Pollock’s lucid
intelligence: “It is a myth that he wasn’t verbal. He could be hideously verbal when wanted to be. Ask
the people he really talked to: Tony Smith [a sculptor friend] and me. He was lucid, intelligent; it was
simply that he didn’t want to talk art. If he was quiet, it was because he didn’t believe in talking, he
believed in doing” (Glaser, 1999, 34. Emphasis in original.). Art historian Sam Hunter also discerned
the lucidity Pollock possessed: “Verbal communication must have seemed at best a clumsy fiat for
probing one’s innermost feelings through art, and he mistrusted words as a diversion and possible
betrayal. But he needed no outsider to impress on him the revolutionary character of his achievement,
which he fully grasped and at times did express in conversation with a terrible lucidity” (Hunter, 1956,
5).
V. Towards Imagining the Void
Pollock expert Ellen Landau writes that by the late 1940s “Pollock had begun to emerge from the
paralysis of invention of the previous decade. A relentless and ‘fanatical’ conviction had begun to form
in his mind: becoming a truly great artist was the only way he could ever come to terms with his

24
constantly threatening emotional turmoil” (Landau, 1989, 65). A painter friend, Peter Busa, recalled:
“Jack had problems all over: problems with drinking, with adjusting, with women, with the therapeutic
element. I had the feeling his problems prompted him, that that’s what gave him the push” (Potter,
1985, 63). That “push” propelled him ultimately towards the successful filling of the void through the
creation of his classic paintings. Pollock abandoned the reliance on obscure symbolism drawn from a
melange of esoteric sources with the result that by the winter of 1946-47, as William Rubin notes: “the
Expressionist element disappeared and the violence, frustration and tension were largely transformed
into a passionate lyricism—a choreographically rhythmical art capable of an almost Rococo fragility and
grace. The gap between an inherited language and a burgeoning new current, between instinct and self-
awareness, in short, between the potential and the actual had been closed.” (Rubin,1999a, 121-122).
Camus appreciated the import of passion but in the creation of great art passion must be subject
to the application of lucid reason. Pollock’s greater turn to lucidity—intellectual clarity—is a critical
development on the road to the classic pictures. This development is signalled with the 1947 painting
Galaxy, a “picture in which the drip technique was launched” and that was informed by “an intense
detachment” (Clark, 1999, 317. Figure 10). It is possible to detect under the swirls of paint remnants of
the symbolism and figurative markings of the initial painting applied by brush. However, as Landau
speculates, “at some point in the process of painting, Pollock laid down this brush and began instead to
drip and spatter his pigment, not quite completely covering the underlayer, into which he also embedded
small pieces of gravel to increase the texture” (Landau, 1989,169). The drip and spatter painting, as free-
form as it appears, reveals Pollock taking a lucid route of his own to achieve a unique expression of his
quest to fill the void.

25
Figure 10. Jackson Pollock. Galaxy. 1947. Joslyn Art Museum. Omaha, Nebraska, United States.
This was a period when Pollock achieved a degree of emotional stability and lucidity due to a
number of developments: his marriage to the painter Lee Krasner; their move out of hectic war-time
New York City to East Hampton, Long Island; the acquisition of a house with five acres; the conversion
of a barn to a studio where he could work on mural size paintings; his abstaining from drinking under
Krasner’s watchfulness and the support of a local sympathetic doctor; greater confidence in the progress
of his painting. Pollock broke through “to the magical state after which he had always yearned: total
involvement, release, and self-transformation ritually induced in the process of making art” (Landau,
1989, 182). In this state Pollock achieves, through increasingly lucidity, the personal and artistic
freedom that signifies a great artist’s contribution to the human freedom in general and of that of the

26
individual beholder. Hundreds of black and white photographs taken by Hans Namuth of Pollock
painting in his studio convey the freedom and pleasure Pollock experienced and would convey in his
paintings to beholders; “These are image of freedom, of exultation, in almost the same way that the
paintings themselves are” (Toynton, 2012, 70. Figure 11). This became the productive period 1947-
1950, the time he was able to achieve a high level of creative lucidity and harmony. He did not arrive
spontaneously at this state of creative innovation. He had been continually working towards it,
methodically experimenting with new materials and techniques for years.
Figure 11. Hans Nmuth. Photographer. Jackson Pollock painting. 1950. The Springs. New York, New
York.

27
By 1946, the barest reference to any recognizable figuration is increasingly overlaid with thick
layers of dynamic swirls, while the coagulated, overworked façade remains (Figure 12). He soon moves
to totally non-representational works (Figure13). In doing so he drew closer to the all-over drip
application of paint. Toynton describes the transformation in technique that moved entirely away from
the easel painting.
And then he started pouring or hurling or spattering paint directly from the can, controlling the patterns it
made with the motions of his body, hand, and arms. Working swiftly, moving rhythmically around the
canvas like a shaman performing a ritual dance, he acquired a physical grace he did not have at any other
time. When he did make use of a brush, it was often as a tool for drawing in space—flicking paint onto
the canvas from above to create thick, flowing, continuous line, whorls, dense skeins, complex webs of
paint. Then he would kneel on the floor and, extending his body over the canvas, deftly flick more paint,
or draw with a stick in the paint he had already applied. He used trowels, to, and knives. He had not only
liberated painting from the easel and the wall; he had even liberated from the brush. (Toynton, 2012, 47).

28
Figure 12 Jackson Pollock. Eyes in the Heat. 1946. Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Venice, Italy.

29
Figure 13 . Jackson Pollock. Shimmering Substance. 1946. Museum of Modern Art.
New York, New York, United States.
VI In the Void: The Classic Paintings
By 1947, Jackson Pollock provided an explanation of the progress he was making:
My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before paining. I prefer to
tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. 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. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand
painters of the West. I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette,

30
brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, rowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken
glass and other foreign matter added. When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I’m doing. It is
only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about
making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come
through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure
harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well (Pollock, 1999c, 17-18. Emphasis in
the original).
The general public and some in the cultural community may have formed the idea of Pollock as a “wild
man” flinging paint around on the floor but his remarks above reflect his moving forward lucidly to his
most successful efforts to create an imagery that fills the void. Indeed, the curator William Rubin
wondered about why such views were held by so many:
The question arises as to why these pictures—which situate whatever violence they contain in a wide
spectrum of emotions containing far more of passion, joy, exuberance, ecstasy, delight, gravity,
tenderness, suffering, grace, fragility, and at moments, even charm—should have seemed so
overwhelmingly violent, particularly when they first appeared. Perhaps what the public thought they saw
in the pictures really lay in Pollock’s radical challenge to its accepted notions of painting. (Rubin,
1999a, 125. Emphasis in the original).
Pollock’s technical discoveries were a major advance in creating on canvas a working space that allows
for capturing an imagery of the void, one to be shared with the beholder. As Landau perceptively
observes: “The main impetus for adoption of this radical new technique seems to have been Pollock’s
desire to create a holistic experience for both himself and the spectator, and this he knew was dependent
on sustaining the same amount of interest and emphasis throughout each new canvas” (Landau, 1989,
172). By creating a “holistic experience” for the painter and the beholder Pollock achieved the ability to
allow the beholder to participate in the creative process, sharing in the freedom that propelled and
became embodied in the painter’s imagery. Pollock had entered his classic painting period (Figure 14).

31
Figure 14. Hans Namuth, Photographer. Jackson Pollock painting with Lee Krasner Pollock watching.
1950. The Springs, New York, United States.
What is meant by Pollock’s classic period paintings? Art curator Frank O’Hara provides a
dictionary definition: “classical in all its comprehensive, masterful and pristine use of his own passions,
classical in it cool, ultimate beauty, classical in that it is ‘characterized especially by attention to form
with the general effect of regularity, simplicity, balance, proportion, and controlled emotion’ to quote the
dictionary” ( O’Hara, 1959, 24). However, the paintings clearly go beyond technique, as important as
that is. They are classic in being the essence of Pollock’s art; all paintings before the classic period were
searches for the void, all paintings after were searches to regain it. In the classic period in between these
two poles the paintings were Jackson Pollock who for a brief period his life and his art experienced a
harmonious oneness. As well, they are the paintings most rewarding to the beholder who is willing to
devote the effort to enter Pollock’s distinct world.

32
There is no date or painting specifically signifying the beginning of the classic period but with
the painting Number 1A 1948 (Figure 15) Pollock established the all-over drip format of the classic
paintings. Gone in Number 1A 1948 is the pre-classic coagulated, symbol filled, confusing imagery.
Number 1A 1948 was the move to a mural sized, horizontal format, achieving the mid-point between
easel and mural painting Pollock sought. When asked about the large size of his paintings he
acknowledged: “I am more at ease in a big area than I am on something 2x2; I feel more at home in a
big area” (Wright, 1999, 22). He was more at home, having found a mode of creating an imagery of the
void with which he was at ease; that he and the beholder could inhabit. Commenting on Pollock’s
embracing the larger format and all-over drip technique Landau recognizes his desire to reach out to the
beholder: “The main impetus for adoption of this radical new technique seems to have been Pollock’s
desire to create a holistic experience for both himself and the spectator, and this he knew was dependent
on sustaining the same amount of interest and emphasis throughout each new canvas” (Landau, 1989,
172).

33
Figure 15. Jackson Pollock. Number 1A 1948. 1948. Museum of Modern Art. New York. New
York. United States.
Pollock admired American Indian culture and art, so the handprints found near the left, top, and
right edges of the painting can be read as the Indian hand symbol for “welcome;” welcoming the
beholder to enter Pollock’s space and to make it their own. Landau detects this intimate connection with
the beholder: “In this huge canvas a welter of crisscrossing skeins dramatically dips toward the center of
the work, coalescing into a powerful centrifugal vortex” that gives “the feeling that his entire
configuration was hovering in the viewer’s space” (Landau, 1989, 190). Michael Fried also senses the
invitation to the beholder: “The skeins of paint appear on the canvas as a continuous, allover line which
loops and snarls time and again upon itself until almost the entire surface of the canvas is covered by it.
It is a kind of space-filling curve of immense complexity, responsive to the slight impulse of the painter
and responsive as well, one almost feels, to one’s own act of looking” (Fried, 1998, 223). In short,

34
Pollock was creating an imagery of the void both he and the beholder can occupy. A fundamental
accomplishment of Pollock was, through the creation of his own universe, achieving a sense of order
and unity in life, of filling his void, of establishing an experience beholders could share. William Rubin
clearly saw this accomplishment:
Like the pictures of life in older art… which were not images of the way life really was but the way it
might ideally exist, Pollock accepts the challenges of the molecularity and prima facie confusion of
modern life and transcends them, endowing them with a comprehensive order. His image is an
equilibrated and ordered structure of modern experiences which as art provides symbolically precisely the
unity, equilibrium and absolute completeness which life lacks” (Rubin, 137, Emphasis in the original).
The title, Number 1A 1948, also reflected a change to Pollock’s idea of his paintings. He was little
concerned with the titles of his earlier paintings, often letting friends and others suggest titles after the
painting was finished, which he would then approve. The titles were “typically vague, metaphorical, or
‘poetic’” (Freidman, 1972, 94). At times he would change titles at a later time. Consequently, the titles
provide little evidence of his intentions. Krasner explained the shift to the numerical titling of paintings
like Number 1A 1948 in an interview: “Jackson used to give his paintings conventional titles…but now
he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. The make people look at a picture for what it is—pure
painting.” Pollock further explained: “I decided to stop adding to the confusion. Abstract painting is
abstract. It confronts you.” He indicated his paintings have no beginning or end which Krasner
explained “That’s exactly what Jackson’s work is. Sort of unframed space” (Roueche, 1999, 19). That
unframed space, it is asserted here, is the void. Pollock was assigning numerical titles to his classic
paintings (there seems to be no logic to them) much as an astronomer designates astronomical numbers
to newly discovered stars in the void of the unfathomable universe.

35
Albert Camus asserted the artist “must give the void its colors” (Camus, 1955, 114). As Number
1A 1948 demonstrates, Jackson Pollock did so with amazing results. Did he know what he was doing?
Was he consciously striving to find an imagery of the void? It is not possible to discern that during
Pollock’s pre-classic years he explicitly imagined the void; however, he was exploring the unconscious
and drew upon a variety of spiritual, secular, and artistic sources for his imagery leading up to Mural.
As well, individuals who had a personal relationship with Pollock sensed he was struggling to represent
the “phantoms” Camus perceived as haunting an artist confronted by the absurd world. Ellen Landau’s
observation that the density of the imagery in his paintings prior to 1947 displayed “Pollock’s apparent
horror vacui;” they “seem oppressive and suffocating” (Landau, 1989, 161). In Pollock the horror
vacui, the fear of empty space, is the Camusian void, and filling it remained his artistic objective before,
during the classic paintings, and beyond. Lee Krasner Pollock confirmed that Pollock was consistent in
his artistic objectives. When asked if the drip paintings were a major break from earlier paintings she
responded: “I see no sharp breaks, but rather a continuing development of the same themes and
obsessions” (Quoted in Lewison, 1999, 60). The idea of the horror vacui or void arose when Krasner
was interviewed in 1969 by B. H. Friedman about the nature of the classic paintings. He perceived that
“there seems to have been something like a primitive horrow vacui: the entire canvas needing to be
filled—except for Number 32 1950 (Figure 16). In that painting… there’s acceptance of empty space,
negative space, the void. The voids read positively” (Friedman, 1999, 36). Landua sensed a horrow
vacui in the pre-classic paintings and Friedman in the classic paintings, evidence that some perceptive
beholders perceived a presence of the void in Pollock’s pre- and classic work. It will be seen later there
is also evidence of the conscious presence of the void in the post-classic period.

36
Figure 16 . Jackson Pollock. Number 32. 1950. 1950. Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfulen,
Dusseldorf, Germany.
As Pollock’s work became better understood evidence began to appear of the presence of
Camusian traits in Pollock and his work. Sam Hunter saw in the classic paintings Pollock’s need to
confront the lack of order in the world:
His painting world, which seemed to revolve around some radical new principle of indeterminacy, was
remote from the closed and intelligible universe of post-Renaissance art where man cut space to his own
nature. It belonged rather to the vast free spaces of modern science and, in pictorial metaphor, showed the
limits of the modern individual’s rational powers, by opening up glimpses of a nature essentially irrational
and chaotic. (Hunter, 1956-57, 12).
The challenge was to create a new space of order and unity, his own distinct world, which artist and
beholder could share. The large size of the paintings allowed the beholder to share in the sense of unity:
“Since allover composition permits no center of attention, the spectator gets a similar sensation of

37
wholeness and unity” (Cernuschi, 1992, 252). The expansive size of the paintings enveloped the
beholder’s field of vision while encouraging close examination and intimate contemplation further
encouraging a bond between the artist’s creativity and the beholder’s participation in the experience of
the painting (Figure 1).
Pollock achievement of a sense of unity and order through the methodical creation of his own
distinct universe by the application of a lucid intellect overcame the popular early view of him as a
passionate, inchoate expressionist. In his essay, “No Chaos Damn It,” James Coddington argues:
He had technique, and it was anything but rudimentary; he had structure, and it was often exceedingly
complex. He as much as any artist willed order from and gave voice to the dumb colored [sic] muds that
we call paint. He was remarkably consistent in his strategies throughout his career, despite the apparent
variations in his images and methods. That he was able to stretch his methods to allow such variation,
and to apply then to new materials as these became available to him, is another measure of his creativity”
(Coddington, 1999, 101).
William Rubin sensed Pollock achieving “a transcendent unity” achieved through self-examination :
The unity in Pollock’s diversity derived from the continuity of the terms of his interior dialogue, and
reflected the wholeness of his being. This is a transcendent unity in which the painter sacrifices oneness
on a level once removed from himself (his stylistic image through the course of time) in order to find it on
the primary level (his self). For the spectator, the picture is an isolated object, a closed, self-contained
system of meanings and, to that extent, an end. For the painter, the making of it is part of a process of
self-interrogation and, hopefully, self-discovery, and is therefore also a means (Rubin, 1999a, 126.
Emphasis in the original).
Abstract expressionist historian Irving Sandler strikes a similar note, recognizing Pollock’s desire to pull
the beholder into his universe.
Pollock’s all-over paintings convey the impression that his act of painting as absolute, an act in which the
artist is totally immersed. Moreover, he seemed to have wanted his paintings to provoke a similar
response in the viewer—that he lose himself in their delirium. The moods of Pollock’s ‘drip’ paintings
partake of two contrary states of consciousness—ecstasy and anxiety, although more other than not they

38
embody the former. Indeed, they appeared increasingly euphoric with time: the shattered images, jagged
angles, and raw colors of such earlier mythic pictures are far more barbaric than the graceful, fragile
arabesques of the later abstractions. The ‘drip’ paintings were initially apprehended as violent because of
their assault on the audience’s preconceptions about art, and when these prejudices were overcome the
pictures were seen for what they actually were (Sandler,1970, 111).
An important Camusian trait was that the artist must find a balance between representation and
abstraction; between the generally perceived world and the distinct world created by the artist. By not
rejecting life experience but drawing upon it to create a distinct reality the artist neither replicates
accepted perceptions of reality nor resorts to a pure abstraction that ignores the general perceptions of
reality. Pollock had a great reverence for nature, he saw himself as at one with the real. When he was
once challenged for not drawing on nature in his work he replied: “I am nature.” (Glaser, 1999, 28.
Emphasis in original). Krasner identified the importance of Pollock’s position for painting and for his
relation to reality: “It breaks once and for all the concept that was still more or less present in Cubist
derived painting, that one sits and observes nature that is out there. Rather, it claims a oneness” (Glaser,
1999, 28). Pollock declared: “My concern is with the rhythm of nature…. I work inside out, like
nature” (Landau, 1989, 159). As well, he did not see abstraction as something apart from the artist’s
time. He believed “Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the
age that we’re living in” (Wright, 1999, 20). However, the modern artist will need to find new
techniques to achieve what they want to express: “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express
this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past
culture. Each age finds its own technique” (Wright, 1999, 20).
As he did not see his abstraction as a thing apart from reality, he often incorporated signs from
the “real” world such as items implanted in his paintings, Full Fathom Five being an example with its

39
nails, buttons, key, coins, matches, cigarettes (Figure 17). Some paintings, such as Number 1A 1948,
include handprints, another link to the perceived reality (Figure 15). The abstract painter Frank Stella
finds the abstraction/reality tension that Camus expected and Pollock achieved:
The question of where the paint skeins are in relation to the painting’s surface is an important one because
it seeks to define the working space of abstract painting. The fact that this working space is defined by a
contradiction which allow the paint skeins to be in two place at the same time should give us pause. The
notion that we see the paint skeins sometimes on the canvas surface and sometimes floating in front of it
leaves the space surrounding the skeins with an ambiguous but strangely compelling set of coordinates
which essentially describes a location in motion. Here we have Pollock’s trajectory lifted free of the
painting’s surface, bringing loosened bits of the background with it. ….abstraction and realism chasing
each other’s tail” (Stella, 1986, 84. Emphasis added).

40
Figure 17. Jackson Pollock. Full Fathom Five. 1947. Museum of Modern Art. New York, New York,
United states.
The most striking example of Pollock maintaining a link between his distinct reality and the
generally perceived reality is Number 29, 1950 (Figure 18 ). This is a painting on glass where Pollock
“proceeded to create a three-dimensional collage into which he incorporated available materials: beach
pebbles, shells, sand, and pieces of colored plastic. Other odds and ends, including agates, marbles, and
sections of wire mesh were also embedded in a layering of skeins of oil and enamel paint” (Landau,
1989, 197). He went even further: “Pollock had kept Number 29, 1950 outdoors, obsessed with the idea
of using it as a framing device for the East Hampton landscape. … Pollock had allowed Number 29 to
be altered by the imprint of leaves, the salt air, and other phenomena of Long Island weather (Landau,
989, 197-198). Keeping the painting propped up outdoors allowed the beholder to look through
Pollock’s reality to that which the beholder is more familiar, the two realities are blended into one work
of art; “abstraction and realism chasing each other’s tail,” as Stella so vividly described the interaction of
the two modes of painting.

41

42
Figure 18. Jackson Pollock. Number 29 1950. 1950. National Gallery of Canada. Ottawa, Canada.
Pollock’s full achievement is captured by Naifeh and Smith when they asked: “Why did Jackson
Pollock begin to drip paint? What was the source of his inspiration? The question has preoccupied
artists, critics, and art historians since drip paintings first appeared in 1947” (Naifeh and Smith, 1989,
553). After reviewing the many theories offered by art historians and critics they concluded:
What happened in the first few days of 1947 was not the discovery of a new technique. There was no
need for him to thin his paint too much, throw a brush in anger, accidentally dribble ink, or kick over a
pot of paint [all theories at the time]. The technique was already at hand. What it lacked was a vision—a
way of seeing what would bring its delicate, evocative lines to life, an imagination fecund and vivid
enough to keep those lines suspended through a thousand loops, making each new loop as tensile and
expressive as the last. In 1947, Jackson found that vision in himself. Like all discoveries, it was the result
of going backwards, not forward; an epiphany of the past. ‘Painting is self- discovery,’ Jackson once said,
‘Every good artist paints what he is.’” (Naifeh and Smith, 1989, 556).

43
Naifeh and Smith capture the essence of the Pollock’s achievement in the oneness of his lucid intellect,
fertile imagination, and sophisticated techniques; that is, the complete unity of his life and art, as Camus
would have expected of such a great artist. It is traits that allowed him to braid the threads of the void.
VII Threading the Void
In an unfathomable world a person is confronted with a continual need to choose between
contradictions, the most fundamental, as Camus so dramatically asserted, between life and death. Such
contradictions haunt a person confronting their own void. The contradictions, the phantoms plaguing
Pollock, included creativity/impotency, reason/instinct, progress/stagnation, success/failure,
love/animosity, past/future, hope/despair, loyalty/betrayal, sobriety/inebriation, affluence/penury. How
would he reconcile his contradictions? His life and art being one, he paints. In his pre-classic years he
drew upon ancient and modern secular and spiritual belief systems for his imagery, all of which
developed over the centuries of human endeavour as a means of resolving the contradictions of a chaotic
world. When confronted with a contradiction Camus argued a person should reject the absolute
extremes of opposing poles, instead adopting a flexible equilibrium that recognizes the opposites
underlying unity. This is the law of moderation whereby a person braids between the contradictory
poles “with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to breaking point” (Camus, 1955, 202).
By applying the law of moderation to the chaos of contradictions that can fill the void a person achieves
a sense of order and unity in the world, a sense of well-being.
The distinguishing imagery of the classic paintings is the all-over entwined lines enmeshed in
markings of dripped and thrown paint. The lines are the logical imagery of threads braiding the cord
binding the contradictions haunting Pollock’s Camusian void by applying the maximum lucidity to his
work. Often the swirls of lines are appropriately referred to as skeins, a skein being a loosely coiled

44
length of thread on a reel. The threads of lines throughout his paintings are Pollock’s success in finding
a creative imagery that expresses his well- being, overcoming the phantoms of his void, and bringing
him closer to his own distinct reality. Threads of lines were no accidental method but the result of the
lucid application of a controlled mind and hand. When asked if he controlled the accidents in his
paintings he responded: “What makes you think it’s an accident when I know what I’m going to drip
before I work…I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident, just as there is no beginning or end”
(Landau, 1989, 172. Emphasis in original). Other artists prior to Pollock had experimented with
dripping and pouring lines but Pollock pursued the technique “with a logic and control that signalled his
maturity and independence off all the well-known precedents for it” (Landau, 1989, 169). Pollock was
threading the void with a balance of great deliberation and with great passion.
Others appreciated Pollock’s creative braiding of threads of line. Frank O’Hara asserted: “There
has never been enough said about Pollock’s draftsmanship, that amazing ability to quicken a line by
thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line—to change, to
reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass by drawing alone” (O’Hara,
1959, 26). O’Hara found a wide array of qualities in Pollock’s line: “instinctive rightness,” “the
Baroque quality,” “passionate exhalation,” “heroic,” “ritualistic,” and “dramatic” (O’Hara, 1959, 26).
Frank Stella identified the importance of Pollock’s braiding of threads in resolving contradictions in an
artists working space:
The question of where the paint skeins are in relation to the painting’s surface is an important one because
it seeks to define the working space of abstract painting. The fact that this working space is defined by a
contradiction which allow the paint skeins to be in two place at the same time should give us pause. The
notion that we see the paint skeins sometimes on the canvas surface and sometimes floating in front of it
leaves the space surrounding the skeins with an ambiguous but strangely compellent set of coordinates
which essentially describes a location in motion. Here we have Pollock’s trajectory [Out of the Web:

45
Number 7, 1949, Figure ] lifted free of the painting’s surface, bringing loosened bits of the background
with it. ….abstraction and realism chasing each other’s tail” (Stella, 1986, 84).
As Stella’s remarks reveal, Pollock was not only resolving contradictions of the void through his braid
threading technique, but the contradictions themselves were integral to the structure of the paintings;
contradictions in the working space between background and foreground, between abstraction and
realism. The drip paintings freed line from its traditional artistic tasks: “In these works Pollock has
managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its
tasks of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representation, on the surface of
the canvas” (Fried, 1998, 224). Like Stella, Fried sees Pollock creating a new kind of artistic working
space: “The materiality of his pigment is rendered sheerly visual, and the result is a new kind of space—
if it still makes sense to call it space—in which conditions of seeing prevail rather than one in which
objects exist, flat shape are juxtaposed or physical events transpire’ (Fried, 1998, 224-225). Pollock’s
use of line was so sophisticated that, as Cernuschi notes: “In effect, what Pollock achieved was a
reduction of the autonomous properties of line, color, composition, and density of pigment into an
almost unprecedented synthesis” (Cernuschi, 1992, 137). Consequently, all elements of the painting
contribute to the threading of contradictions into a coherent filling of the void for artist and beholder.
Claude Cernuschi identifies an almost physical bond between the beholder and the artist: “To a
greater extent than in painting prior to Pollock, the process of creation remains visible in and becomes
part of the final product. So close is the relationship between certain strokes on the canvas and Pollock’s
‘choreography’ that, in imagination, spectators can almost feel themselves reconstructing the artist’s
physical movements in space” (Cernuschi, 1992, 110). The result is that a painting “seems to have
generated a feeling of co-identity between the artist and his work” (Cernuschi, 1992, 114).The British
critic David Sylvester provides acute insight into Pollock’s creation of his own world. Reviewing a

46
retrospective exhibit in London in 1958, Sylvester wrote; “What the exhibition has made me see is the
serenity of his art” (Sylvester, 2002, 62, Emphasis in original). He is especially insightful in capturing
Pollock’s ability to bring the beholder into the painting and the creative process:
With a Pollock we create the perspectives as we move about in the painting. We are not spectators but
participants, participants in its creation … We are as much a part of it as we are of the sea when we go
swimming… The picture is always changing, always becoming. And it changes by virtue of our imagined
movement within it. Its space is a fluid space defined and redefined by our movement. It is a space that
exists only in so far as it exists in time. The paining is like a living organism (Sylvester, 2002, 63).
The beholder develops an intimate bond with the painting and its continual creation: “To look at a
Pollock over a period of time is not to acquire a deeper understanding of a finished thing but to observe
and assist in its growth” (Sylvester, 2002, 63). Looking is crucial to understanding Pollock; he had
definite expectations of the beholder viewing his work. By becoming familiar with the newness of his
techniques over time they “will discover the deeper meanings in modern art” (Wright, 1999, 20). As
well, they should “not look for, but look passively—and try to receive what the painting has to offer and
not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for” (Wright, 1999, 22).
While the classic paintings are a record of Pollock’s confrontation with the Camusian void; they are also
a confrontation with beholders of his work, demanding from them the lucidity, passion, and intense
visual examination that can open for them the harmony and freedom Pollock reached in creating the
paintings.
Landau writes “Undated, but psychologically consistent with this time period [1947-1950], is
Pollock’s well –known, quite eloquent (for a nonverbal man) summation of himself and his work”
(Landau, 1989, 181-182).
Jackson Pollock. Handwritten statement. Undated
Technic is the result of a need—
new needs demand new technics—
total control—denial of
the accident—

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States of order—
organic intensity—
energy and motion
made visible—
memories arrested in space,
human needs and motives—
acceptance—
(Pollock, 1999b, 24)
This very personal handwritten statement reflects many of the Camusian traits of a great artist that are
evident in Pollock and his work during the classic period: lucid state of mind (“total control,” “denial of
accident”) desire for order and unity (“state of order,” “organic intensity”), creation of a distinct reality
(“energy and motion made visible”), innovation (“new needs demand new technics” ), the bond with the
beholder (“memories arrested in space,” “human needs and motives”), inner harmony with the void
(“acceptance”).
Number 29, 1950 (Figure 18), one of Pollock’s most innovative works of that period of his life,
was done by Pollock in collaboration with Hans Namuth who filmed Pollock creating the work. As soon
as the film was completed Pollock “immediately walked into the house and poured himself a succession
of stiff drinks. A few hours later, after having been stone sober for two years, he was so out of control
that he overturned the dinner table, in an appalling reprise of many an earlier drunken rag” (Landau,
1989, 204). Tragically, the lucid classic period came to a close.
VIII Out of the Void
In 1950, at an exhibit of the classic paintings held at the Betty Parsons Gallery only one painting
sold. Pollock continued drinking heavily, experienced periods of depression, and initiated
violent incidents. In 1952, Pollock did paint Blue Poles which, although one of his most famous
paintings, is the last gasp of the over-all drip paintings (Figure 19). Blue Poles is not of the
quality of the paintings of the classic period. Rather than an image of the threaded the void it is a

48
return to Mural, a wall having distinct top and bottom edges, long streams of painting flowing
from the top to bottom, a chaotic skein, and quasi-figurative “poles’ marching from one end to
the other. It is not a space inviting to the beholder confronted by the marching barbed poles. It is
evidence Pollock had lost contact with his Camusian void. However, he attempted to continue
confronting it.
Figure . Jackson Pollock. Blue Poles. 1952. National Gallery of Australia. Canberra, Australia.

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Figure 20. Jackson Pollock. Portrait and a Dream. 1953. Dallas Museum of Art. Dallas, Texas,
United States.
Around the time Pollock painted Blue Poles he painted Portrait and a Dream (Figure 20). The
imagery can be seen as Pollock on the right observing from the outside a void of scrambled, discordant
threads on the left. Gone is lucidity underlying the classic images. Pollock has portrayed himself
outside the void, looking on in stymied bewilderment. Jeffrey Potter, Pollock friend and biographer
provides a vivid sense of Pollock’s state of mind in the winter of 1954-1955 that reinforces Pollock had
lost contact with the void. According to Potter at that time Pollock was alternating between rage and
despair (Potter, 1985, 191). Hoping to lift his spirits Potter asked Pollock how he felt having achieved
great success. Pollock responded:
Lousy…When you’ve done it, turns out you’re done for—in yourself you’re nowhere and no one…you’re
caught, only nothing’s holding you…you got to go somewhere, to the edge of something, but there’s no
edge…crissake, we came here alone but we don’t got to go alone. The way I see it, we’re parts of a hole,
like a glove turned inside out. And outside of the glove, the hole, is a reality we can’t imagine because it’s
endless—the universe holding existence together…no shit” (Potter, 1985, 192, Deletions in the original).
This is the lamentation of a man who has lost the unity and order of mastering the absurd void,
especially if we read “a hole” as “a whole,” the whole being a “reality we can’t imagine because it is
endless—the universe holding existence together,” words that resonate with Camus’s “reality we
recognize without ever having known it” (Camus, 1960, 265). It is because of this endless reality of the
universe that Camus sees the necessity for the artist to create their own reality to share with the beholder.

50
Pollock achieved that objective in the classic period but in Portrait and a Dream the artist can only gaze
at the void, unable to braid a cord from the scattered threads, unable to formulate his own distinct reality.
Yet, in Portrait and a Dream he was trying to get back to the void. Pollock declared to two
visitors to his studio “that it was a painting of great anguish, that it represented a terror of the void,” the
phantom that haunted Pollock throughout his life (Naifeh and Smith, 1989, 729). He exclaimed to
another couple “That’s a portrait of me, can’t you see it?” (Landau, 1989, 218). The classic works
were created during a period of intellectual lucidity and emotional stability; Portrait and a Dream
demonstrates he could not achieve the harmony required to sustain his creative momentum.
It is not uncommon for commentaries on Pollock to track lavishly the development of his
paintings to specific biographical events of his tumultuous life. Irving Sandler challenges the writers of
this type of analysis: “They wrote of the work as a key to his biography and, with the artist’s
cooperation, wove stories about his life. …Then they re-interpreted his painting according to the legends
they wove about his life. This led to gross distortions, for Pollock was, in fact, an artist of sophistication
and erudition, alive to most every tradition in Western art” (Sandler,1970, 102). Pollock expert and
curator Kirk Varnedoe also challenges the lock-step biographical-painting approach to analysis of
Pollock:
Whether picture by picture or year by year, Pollock’s work does not lend itself to being organized
according to any consistent, linear model of development—or linked in any steadily evident fashion with
the unfolding of his life. And the disconnection between the order of his innovations and the narrative of
his biography is matched, on an even more important level by the disconnection between these various
pictures as we now see them and the nature of the man as anecdotal history allows us to understand him.
This is especially true in regard to the poured paintings, which—it needs stressing anew—are not
expressionist art in any standard sense of the word” (Varnedoe, 1999, 241-242).
Sandler and Varnedoe comments are cautionary reminders that Pollock was a complex individual
and exceptional artist; certainly not driven solely by his terror. Camus offers an alternative position that

51
binds biography and art as one phenomenon in assessing a great artist; The absurd “leads to a special
conception of the work of art” (Camus, 1955, 114). Rather than seeing an artist’s works as a successive
series of isolated events they should be seen as expressions of an artist’s “profound thought...in a
constant state of becoming” that “adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape” (Camus, 1955,
114). An artist’s individual works may seem unrelated, even contradictory; “But viewed all together,
they resume their natural grouping. Only with the death of the artist do “they derive their definitive
significance. They receive their most obvious light from the very life of their author” (Camus, 1955,
115). In the unfolding of Pollock’s life the metaphor of the Camusian void that accounts for his
development, linking his biography and art. Pollock possessed the Camusian traits that allowed him to
achieve his singular artistic achievement: the bond of his life and art; his lucidity; his looking inward for
inspiration; the breaking with habitual forms of representing reality; the creating a distinct reality of his
own; a reality created through an abstraction that did not abandon completely reference to the lived
world; success in including the beholder in the creation and enjoyment of a painting; resolving the
contradictions of the void thereby creating a “reality we recognize without ever having known it.” This
reality was the threading of the void; an artistic achievement that establishes Pollock as one of the
greatest artists of the twentieth century.
X A Selection of Jackson Pollock Classic Paintings

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Figure . Jackson Pollock. Out of the Web. 1949. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany.

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Figure . Jackson Pollock. Number 1, 1949. Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles,
California, United States.
Figure . Jackson Pollock. Number 8. 1949. Neuberger Museum of Art. Purchase College.
State Univerity of New York. Westchester County, New York, United States.

54
Figure . Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31, 1950. 1950. Museum of Modern Art. New York,
New York, United States.

55
Figure . Jackson Pollock. Number 27. 1950. Whitney Museum of American Art. New York,
New York. United States.

56
Figure . Jackson Pollock. Number one, 1950 (Lavender Mist). 1950. National Gallery of Art.
Washington, D.C. United States.

57
Figure . Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm 1950. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York,
New York, United States.
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