Evelyn Toynton

Evelyn Toynton’s work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Book Review, the American Scholar, and other publications. She is the author of Modern Art, a novel based on Jackson Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner. This excerpt is from a biography of Pollock (1912–1956), who is considered one of the great American abstract expressionist painters. He is known for his large canvases, which lay on the floor as he splattered, dripped, and applied paint from above.

The nineteenth-century English aesthete Walter Pater said that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music… . In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression.” Or, as the critic George Steiner has written, “The energy that is music puts us in felt relation to the energy that is life; it puts us in a relation of experienced immediacy with the abstractly and verbally inexpressible, but wholly palpable, primary fact of being.”¹ Beginning with the mural he painted for Guggenheim, Pollock’s work got closer and closer to the condition of music—specifically, to jazz, the one indubitably, quintessentially American art form, which Pater might not have recognized as music at all.

The form of the drip paintings emerged as Pollock worked on them; he did not make sketches or work out in his mind beforehand what he intended the finished canvas to look like. Instead, like a jazz musician improvising on a theme, he relied on his instinctive sense of what worked, what the painting itself called for, once the process of making it was under way: “When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I am doing…the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”²

Also like a jazz musician, he made use of accident and chance, though Pollock, understandably defensive about suspicions of his artistry, was at pains to minimize the role these played in his process: “I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident,” he said, and “I don’t use the accident—’cause I deny the accident.”³ Yet, as we have seen, he used whatever materials happened to fall on the canvas as he worked, incorporating cigarette ash, cigarette butts, and dead insects into the work at various junctures, as well as the broken glass and sand “and other foreign matter” that he added deliberately.

The freer his paintings became, the more they seemed to tap into some of the same “primitive,” preverbal impulses as jazz—to express, like jazz, the workings of the unconscious, not through the use of symbols but directly. Like jazz, they convey a sense of exultation, of urgent, rhapsodic feeling just barely contained—the Nietzschean tension between wildness and form. (It is telling that Nietzsche identified that state of ecstasy and wildness with Dionysus, the god of wine; jazz musicians are more notorious even than Pollock for their use of consciousness-altering substances of various kinds.)

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Like jazz, the drip paintings give the impression of freewheeling immediacy and spontaneity—a distinctively American quality—while exhibiting the same high-wire discipline necessary to avoid spinning out of control. Neither Pollock nor a great jazz musician improvises from scratch; there is a huge fund of skill and knowledge, of knowing the moves, that is being drawn on in the act itself. But perhaps the most striking point of resemblance is the way both are governed by rhythm.

A passionate aficionado, Pollock told Krasner that jazz was “the only other creative thing happening in the country.”⁴ But though it is always progressive jazz that his work is likened to—especially the edgy, radically experimental music of Charlie Parker, who like Pollock renewed the art form in which he worked through his own originality and daring—when it came to jazz, Pollock was a conservative. Rather than Parker and bebop, he listened to the more traditional musicians he had first heard when he was young, people like Louis Armstrong and Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

Notes

1. Pater, The Renaissance, pp. 95, 98; Steiner, Real Presences, p. 196.

2. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock, p. 40.

3. Quoted in Karmel, Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, pp. 138, 22 (interview with William Wright).

4. O’Meally, Jazz Cadence of American Culture, p. 179.

(2012)