Greyed Rainbow
JACKSON POLLOCK
JACKSON POLLOCK, 1953. OIL ON LINEN.
Jackson Pollock was at the height of his fame when he started to abandon the medium that had brought him there. Working with a more commercial gallery, that called for a more demanding production schedule from Pollock, he sunk deeper into alcoholism, depression and the ‘drip paintings’ that had made him seemed to represent a past he was no longer in touch with. This is one of the last substantial abstract works that Pollock made, and one of the few in his later career that still features the elements of chance creation that defined his major period. This painting can be read as a self-portrait of Pollocks interior life, as bright splashes of color, hopefully suggestions of the rainbow sit in the bottom third, increasingly obscured by a darkness that seems to overtake and move down the canvas in a chaotic dance. The rainbow has been greyed, the light are going out of the artist’s spirit and he paints in an attempt, perhaps, to communicate the internal turmoil that he cannot put into words.