Jackson Pollock
Cathedral, 1947
Enamel and aluminum paint on canvas
71 1/2 x 35 1/16 in. (181.61 x 89.06 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard J. Reis, 1950.87
© Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In a series of photographs taken by Hans Namuth in 1950, Jackson Pollock is seen hovering over a number of immense pieces of canvas that lie on his studio floor, as he lets paint flow from the end of a brush or stick in gestures that required considerable acrobatic facility. Pollock’s Cathedral dates from his first series of paintings of 1947–50, in which the artist perfected this drip technique that forever changed the way art was created and perceived. The term “drip,” though descriptive, is somewhat misleading, as it implies that Pollock merely flung paint onto his canvases. In fact his technique was extremely controlled. Evidence of this can be seen in the deliberate placement and layering of paint that covers the surface of Cathedral in an overall composition, a hallmark of abstract expressionist painting. Likened to the facade of a Gothic cathedral by the poet and curator Frank O’Hara, Cathedral’s tight yet dynamic interlacings of black, white, and silver also suggest an energy made visible: here Pollock has recorded in paint the actions that went into the work’s very making. Such protean ideas of the artist as grand creator—Pollock famously stated, "I am nature"— would influence the course of art through the rest of the century.

Jackson Pollock made his interior life grandly exterior, creating a body of work which, in its mix of psychological power and outsized scale, sounded a new vocabulary in depicting the individual in an increasingly unsettling and destabilized world. Baring his self in a way few other American artists could (or would), Pollock redefined the very character of what it meant to be an artist and to make art in the contemporary world. Nothing that came after him could remain the same.