Black and White Number 20
Jackson Pollock
JACKSON POLLOCK, 1951. OIL ON CANVAS.
In furious movement and palpable energy, a new dawn broke. Pollock was the figurehead and the engine behind a new conception and understanding of art, one that built on Surrealist ideas of unconscious drawing, where the hand was allowed to move freely, unchained from the ideas of the waking mind, but pushed it further to truly represent emotion. Called Abstract Expressionism, it removed not only conscious thought from the creation of artworks but, in Pollocks case, interaction between the hand and the canvas. Pollock would stand above the blank page and splatter paint in wild gestures, allowing the chaos of the natural, physical world to serve as his collaborator. The work is visceral and immediate, for all its abstraction it provides a clearer representation of the psyche than any works that came before. Black and White Number 20 was made just 5 years before Pollocks untimely death and at a time when his alcoholism was worsening. It feature little brushwork, but is more deliberate than earlier examples, the monochromatic nature not allowing us to get lost in anything other than the texture and Rorschach form.