Art Beyond Sight: Handbook

"Convergence," Jackson Pollock (1952)

Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Jackson Pollock

Convergence, 1952

At nearly 8 feet high and 13 feet wide, Convergence is one of Pollack's celebrated "drip" paintings in which he drizzled and poured paint directly onto the canvas without using a paintbrush. The canvas rested on the floor as Pollock worked; the result is a document of his activity tracing the curves of his arms as he distributed paint in dribs and drabs.

Loops, spots and drips of paint extend over the entire surface of the tan canvas. Pollack started with black to establish a "background" of sorts before continuing with primary color highlights of red, yellow, blue, and white. The black paint has been scribbled, brushed and spotted so that two-thirds of the canvas has been randomly painted over in a tangled web of lines. One can imagine Pollack sweeping his arms and body across the painting and letting his unconscious mind guide his hands along. At the same time, thin, spiderwebbed veins of black indicate that there's a certain delicacy at work, which the eye experiences almost musically.

The red highlight begin with a loop in the lower right corner and travels left into another loop, drizzling to the left corner before sweeping up into a pretzel in the upper left corner. From there, it works its way across the painting to the right corner where it disappears off the canvas. The blue highlights are much more subdued; not only is there less of it on the canvas, but it looks as the color has been watered down. Generally, it adheres to the same trail as the red paint, but clouds of it venture into the center of the painting where the red does not. The yellow theme also circles the painting's center, following a similar chaotic yet definite path around, and at sometimes, through the middle of the canvas. The white paint in Convergence , which looks like whipping cream on the black background, is applied more liberally along its route than the primary colors, as if it's offsetting the black. One can almost feel the variety of textures that this swirling and dripping creates, as the painting relies on nothing but the drizzled line to an image in and of itself.

The monumental scale and lack of central focus in paintings like this one impressed younger painters who saw in Pollock's work an aesthetic of process: the painting constitutes an instantaneous record of the particular creative act, the encounter between painter, his unconscious, pigment, and chance. But the controlled frenzy of his artwork defined the gestural branch of Abstract Expressionism. Pollack was killed in an automobile accident in 1956.