What is abstract art?
The Freedom of Expression as the Expression of Freedom
Abstract Art — Then & Now
What do you see in this painting?
There’s a fine line between abstract art and mere decoration, and Jackson Pollock’s Number 32 (1950) skates that line.
It’s neither meaningful nor meaningless, neither expressive nor expressionless. It says a great deal about western art to the person trained in art history. To many people who aren’t, it’s a banality that barely says anything at all.
The painting is a web of lines and patches of colour produced by freely pouring cheap household black paint straight onto a raw, unadulterated canvas.
It’s enormous — nine feet high and fifteen feet wide, and envelopes your field of vision as you draw in close to view it.
Traditionally, even abstract paintings are composed of interrelated parts with varying emphases and depth conveyed through colour and shade. Number 32 has no parts — it’s all interrelation, all emphasis across the expanse of the rectangle of its surface.
This gives it a very shallow optical depth, perhaps no depth at all — just a skin of paint on a canvas. It’s a repudiation of form, and of colour. Even its name, simply a…
