The leaves have turned and autumn is well and truly here; so this week’s painting is Autumn Rhythm by Jackson Pollock. One of a handful of climactic masterpieces painted at the zenith of his all too brief career, it can be seen, displayed in splendid, necesssary isolation, and in natural light, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Pollock painted the picture in the summer of 1950, when he and his wife Lee Krasner were living on Long Island, just outside New York, close to the Pacific Ocean. It is an enormous work, almost nine feet tall and more than seventeen feet wide, and there was barely room for the required expanse of canvas inside the converted barn that the artist was using for a studio. Nicknamed “Jack the Dripper” by an irreverent hack, he was at the time experimenting with a new way of painting. Pollock worked not at an easel but on the floor, pouring, dripping and flicking ready-mixed oils straight from the can, creating compositions resembling dense skeins of pigment woven on fields of dot, dash and spatter. “I feel nearer, more 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.” He had little to say about the subject matter or meaning of his pictures, preferring to leave interpretation in the eye and mind of the beholder. The origins of his approach have been traced to the Surrealist practise of “automatic” painting and drawing, but whereas the Surrealists doodled and blotted in the hope of excavating imagery from the subconscious, Pollock suppressed any trace of conventional representation. “If it creeps in,” he said, “I try to do...

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