An abstract expressionist explosion in the heart of New York City

Of the many proud possessions New York’s Museum of Modern Art can claim, one is undoubtedly Jackson Pollock’s No. 31. A marvelous example of how art can make something out of nothing much, it is an orgy of dribbles, splashes, specks and flickers which my not do much for the observer at first, but if you let it take you over, the painting pulses with energy. You could be confronting a star-map, the nerve-paths of the brain, a primeval forest, or all three at once. It is a huge work, more than 17 feet wide, and one seems to get lost inside it.

With Jackson Pollock, one has said, the bigger the work, the more power, and No. 31 is said to be the most poised and intricate of all. When in 1945 Jackson Pollock found an area Picasso had not painted, sound, he and his wife moved to Long Island where they lived with no hot water and only a coal stove as heat. At night Jackson heard sounds, which he began to paint. In fact, Pollock pursued sounds ranging from insect noises to jazz, wanting in his art syncopation and fervor, too. Pollock began to spill paint, in a muscular dance, on canvases in his barn and then, with No. 31 or “One: No.31, 1950″, he broke through with his vast and visible panorama of jazz-inflected sounds and reached a fascinated audience who now saw his works of art as “Picasso paintings blown to pieces.”

Regarded as a mostly reclusive artist, but had a volatile personality, No. 31 was one of three wall-size paintings that Pollock painted in swift succession in the summer and autumn of 1950. The density of these interlacing liquid threads of paint is balanced and offset by puddles of muted, striking colors and by his now famous spattering technique. But whatever the technique, the pictorial result of this artistic tension has become a landmark in the history of Abstract Expressionism.

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