Name: How Art Arrived At Jackson Pollock
Uploaded: 2026-02-07T17:07:03.000Z
Duration: 6 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When should you start the story of this painting?

Maybe here in Cezanne's studio at the close of the 19th century?

Or maybe the only place you can really find the genesis of this canvas is in Jackson Pollock's mine.

Because this painting, one, number 13, 1950, is the only abstract work of art that has ever floored me in person.

As soon as my eyes caught it, it made me feel something.

I don't know that I could describe the feeling, but

I didn't have to go searching for it either.

A problem I often have with non figurative paintings, where I'm standing in front of a canvas, trying to figure out the reaction I'm having to it, feeling guilty because nothing's coming.

I don't think the power of this Pollock depend on its place in the history of art.

Its style, its use of color, its hyperactivity are intrinsic qualities.

But I do think the history of art has a lot to say through Pollock strip paintings, which he'd been making by this point for about four years.

In many ways, they're the culmination of something that has a foggy beginning about a century or two before.

With the gradual end of church and noble patronage of the arts.

And the dawn of painters painting what was important to them.

There's no fixed point where you could mark the beginning of modern arts.

Some find it in this painting by Minet from 1863, with its flattened image and scandalous subject that flouted the values of the Paris Salon.

And I think it's as good a moment as any.

That year, fully 2/3 of submissions to the Salon were rejected.

And after a public outcry, Emperor Napoleon III authorized a second salon to feature them.

Called, appropriately, the Exhibition of Rejects.

And though these paintings were criticized as much as they were praised, it marked a moment of legitimacy for art that stood outside the academy's hierarchy of quality.

Once the cat was out of the bag, things started moving very quickly.

Less than 10 years later, Claude Monet and his compatriots launched into Impressionism, concerning themselves not with the objects they see in the world, but

Impressionism, in turn, starts a chain reaction of, well, reaction.

The Post Impressionists begin to dispense with the effects of light and the reality of color and paint according to subjective experience and emotional vision.

Then the Fauvists take the arbitrariness of color to Kaleidoscopic extremes in the first decade of the 20th century.

I mean, just look at the transformation that's happened to painting.

In just 40 short years, art has unraveled its centuries long aim of reproducing the physical world in perspective, color and form is rapidly being abandoned.

Vasily Kandinsky, influenced by the Impressionists, by the Fauvist, by music and by the geometric spirituality of Theosophy, starts pulling away from representation entirely.

In a groundbreaking book he writes, the more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.

And in 1910 he paints this in which no objects from our world can be recognized at all.

Except it turns out that Hilma Aufklint was actually painting abstracts at least three years prior to this.

But no one knew that until many years later.

Meanwhile, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were shaking up painting in their own way by formalizing Cezanne's experiments with multiple perspectives into Cubism.

The Cubists used geometry to show reality from many angles simultaneously.

Kandinsky takes inspiration from this, but is more interested in abstracting geometry from its representational source.

The sparks that fly from these investigations create several other movements.

Futurism in Italy, De Stael in the Netherlands, Suprematism then Constructivism in Russia, Dada in Switzerland, and

eventually surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s.

A key aspect of the Surrealist manifesto is the focus on automatic creation.

Writing or speaking without forethought as a way to access the unconscious mind.

Painters like Andre Masson applied this to the visual arts, letting ink run free across paper, creating fluid, dreamlike drawings prefiguring the work of Jackson Pollock.

As World War II ravaged Europe, several of the Surrealists and other European artists escaped to New York City and began to mix with a new school of American painters.

The Americans synthesized and reacted to all the various European styles.

The Abstract Expressionists, as they were called, made work that was deeply personal, formally inventive and confrontational.

Exiled Surrealist Wolfgang Palin put it, paintings no longer represent.

Today it has become the role of the painting to look at the spectator and ask him, what do you represent?

Pollock's drip paintings push abstraction to its furthest limit.

Even in Kandinsky, lines still bound recognizable shapes.

In Pollock, there are no shapes, no suggestions to grab onto.

The line itself dancing across the canvas is set free, containing nothing, separating nothing.

There is no inside, no outside, nowhere for your eyes to rest.

All that remains is energy, wild emotional energy that peers into you, not the other way around.

I think that's why I reacted so strongly to this painting in person.

You know, like I said before, these drip paintings have intrinsic value, but

I also think they speak to something deep in human nature.

That we are obsessive in the same way that we won't stop until we're flying among the stars.

It took less than a hundred years for this to become this.

A fast changing world contributed hugely, of course.

But beyond that, I do believe there's a drive in us to take things as far as they can go.

And the Century of Modern Art is an exhilarating example of that.

It's just inspiring how irrepressible human creativity can be.

This episode was brought to you by Squarespace.

If you don't know, you can use Squarespace to make sharp, beautiful websites for anything you might need.

A personal site, a wedding website, a site for your business or portfolio.

Their design team has crafted these really professional looking templates that work on computer browsers and on mobile, switching perfectly between the two.

You can integrate your own photos and videos with just a few clicks and you can even link your social account so that you can auto post to Twitter and Facebook all from within Squarespace.

Head over to squarespace.com for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, don't forget to go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10% off your first purchase.