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participation in Siqueiros's experimental
workshop) as a means of 'freeing' both his
procedure and his imagery from self-conscious
attitudes towards the technology of painting.
The solution of technical and physical
problems — problems of 'approach' — thus
entailed solutions to fundamental problems of
expression. These were Pollock's own particular
problems of self-expression, but the manner in
which his concerns were expressed served to
give his paintings status as instantiations of
those concerns he felt in common with his
contemporaries — with the other Abstract
Expressionists and, to a greater or lesser extent,
with all those who shared or can share his
intuitions to any degree. This was one of those
remarkable conjunctions of technical with
ideological radicalism which, when they occur,
mark the moments of true revolution in the
history of art.

5 Jackson Pollock: 1947 onwards
In Hofmann's work from 1940 onwards
(a small painting in oil on plywood, Spring of
1940, is perhaps the earliest) dripped and poured
paint is often deployed in a manner and to
ends not dissimilar to Pollock's. The
particularization of relationships in illusioned
depth — the 'push and pull' of Hofmann's
surfaces — is what separates these works from
the younger man's. The automatism of the
Surrealists (particularly Masson), experiments
with dripped paint by Ernst, and the
experiments conducted in Siqueiros's
workshop have all been mentioned more or less
frequently as sources for Pollock's technique.
In the end what is important is not how
Pollock painted, but how it was for him to paint
that way, i.e. what ends were being served in
those moments and by that technique.28
It was certainly no anarchism in the métier.
(Busa : 'Pollock was a natural painter. He could Jackson Pollock, Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance, 1946
swim in it and come out creating the most Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 24 1/4 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York
beautifully organized lyrical effects. Pollock
had the most articulate understanding of his particular. In certain paintings (the earliest of but nothing could free him from the 'deeper'
means . . .' Matta: 'He was very concerned the all-over paintings of 1947, such as epistemological requirements of painting in the
with paint'.29) The point is that where for Cathedral and Full Fathom Five, and certain twentieth century; in particular he
Hofmann the drip-and-spatter technique was works of the early fifties) these traces are confronted — as did each of the major Abstract
essentially an aspect and a function of visible 'near the surface'; hints, like biomorphs Expressionists in his own way — the specific
composition in the abstract, where for Masson in amber, of another life caught at another range of problems involved in the clash between,
it was a means to the invention and 'discovery' of moment, carrying with them a powerful sense on the one hand, the complex legacy of
form, where for Ernst it was perhaps significant of the particular in experience which is no less painting's illusionistic function (a point of
as a 'departure', for Pollock this activity specific for being impossible of translation departure for all significant painting up to
involved the very shaping of pictorial form. into other terms than those which govern 1947), and on the other, the now
It was his means of synthesizing, of subsuming our means of perceiving them. incontrovertible facticity of the painting as an
his powerful vocabulary of archetypes and It is of course not adequate to describe object and of its surface as a surface which
myths and creatures and of giving that Pollock's procedure as simply a matter of could no longer sustain illusion of the
synthesis a mimetic life in paint — a life, that embodiment in these terms. The problem of narrative kind.
is to say, 'at the moment of painting'.30 For all enlivening the surface of the canvas was one What made these problems so intense for the
that we may see Pollock's interlaced all-over which had to be solved in terms of the Abstract Expressionists was not so much an
canvases of '47 to '5o as representing a new resources available in painting at the time. The ambition to make abstract paintings and to
kind of pictorial space after Analytic Cubism31, comparative art historical 'innocence' of his `flatten' the picture space still further, as a
we cannot but be intuitively aware — if we are technique undoubtedly helped to free Pollock conviction that the making of great art involved
responding with sympathy and without bias from certain inherited approaches to picture- the embodiment of significant content. The
(`Formalist' or 'Literalist' or whatever) — of the making (as outlined above, sections 2 and 3), problem was not what their (abstract) paintings
traces of the life of painting's content in general and empowered him to divest himself of the were to look like so much as how to find a
and of Pollock's paintings' content in second-hand aspects of his vocabulary of motifs; vehicle and how to find space for very specific

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