HARRY COOPER:

Pollock said, “On the floor I feel more at ease. 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.”

NARRATOR:

Jackson Pollock began this large painting by stretching out the canvas on the floor of his barn- turned-studio on the eastern end of Long Island.

Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art.

HARRY COOPER:

He’s using the brushes—not the brush end, but the other end—to guide paint out of the can as he does a kind of dance around the canvas, sometime stepping right into the canvas, pouring the paint, dripping it, dribbling it, flinging it, sometimes, with really big gestures. We see some of those big gestures in the black, going the full height of the canvas. There’s a sense that everything is pulverized.

NARRATOR:

Although there’s the appearance of spontaneity, the very sense that anyone, even a child, can make a painting like this one, Pollock asserted, “I can control the flow of the paint, there is no accident.” Pollock’s process initially shocked the public. But he rather quickly gained the favor of the leading art critics. One dubbed his style “action painting,” calling the canvas a place to act, an arena of sorts. Another, Clement Greenberg, gave this painting its title, “Lavender Mist”; out of the complicated tangle of paint, he saw a purplish aura.

HARRY COOPER:

We have this world of possibilities for how to approach the painting. We can approach it very physically, thinking about action and gesture. Or we can approach it very optically and maybe forget that it was painted on the floor. After all, we’re looking at it on the wall in the museum, just as we look at any other painting. It’s the kind of painting that you can spend a long time in front of. It feels endless.