Newton, Pollock, and Einstein's Happiest Thought
Artists in the mid-1950s sat in the shadow of a colossus: Jackson Pollock. While a few like Morris Louis attempted to pour paint in a slightly different manner to get very different imagery from a related process, most artists were at an impasse. Almost every movement directly afterward, Pop, Minimalism, etc., was a flight from Pollock and Abstract Expressionism towards a completely unrelated style. With his successors playing in orthogonal sandboxes, one path was essentially untouched: directly confronting the master and his hidden sidekick, gravity.
With a major Pollock/Krasner show at The Met and a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective ongoing at the Whitney, along with the upcoming 300th anniversary of the death of the great Isaac Newton, whose universal law of gravity is an exceptional intellectual achievement, I thought it might be interesting to write an article about how one might address Pollock on his terms and in his realm. It was also the core premise in a series of works I produced 10 years ago, including several directly tied to Pollock. Many of these were shown in a year-long solo exhibition at Harvard University's Leverett House.
Before I get to Newton or Einstein's "happiest thought," let me give a quick summary of the art movements subsequent to Pollock. The Minimalists fled to industrially produced or hand-painted works of simple geometric forms, absent of the artist's psychology or gesture. Pop Art, Lichtenstein's genre, focused on commercial irony and mass-produced consumer culture. Despite my harsh but facetious language, this is not to fully dismiss these movements. As a matter of fact, I've wrestled with Minimalism extensively in my art program. In an installation from 2022, I've combined Donald Judd's stacks with Monet, Kandinsky, hay, and a stack (from algebraic geometry) that partly arose from questions of representability in math. In another work from 2023, I wrestle with ABC art (a name Barbara Rose gave Minimalism) with the use of the abc conjecture, a simply stated but profound question in number theory. And Pop Art iconography regularly appears in what would otherwise be abstract, heavy works. Instead of running to screen-printed images of Marilyn, soup cans, painted concentric rectangles, or seeking refuge in commercially produced modular boxes, my idea, here, was to confront Pollock and gravity head-on.
A core tenet of Newton's theory of gravity is that, locally, all objects fall at the same rate. Einstein's happiest thought wasn't E=mc^2. Instead, it was an observation about a falling person which led him to generalize Newton's observation. Einstein explained his observation this way:
"The breakthrough came suddenly one day. I was sitting on a chair in my patent office in Bern. Suddenly a thought struck me: If a man falls freely, he would not feel his weight. I was taken aback. This simple thought experiment made a deep impression on me. This led me to the theory of gravity."
In other words, if you were in a free-falling room, you would be unable to know you were falling, as all the objects would be falling at the same rate. Okay, this is an interesting physics observation, but how does it relate to Pollock?
Well, imagine if his studio was in free fall: his process of dripping paint would be impossible, as the room, Pollock, his brush, can of paint, and the canvas would all fall at the same rate. In other words, gravity's effects would essentially "disappear" and he would be stymied. His iconic process neutralized as the paint would just hover above the canvas.
This effect can lead to other interesting compositions. At the same time Einstein was having his happiest thought, Cézanne's work, particularly his posthumous exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in 1907, was having a major impact on the art world. Cézanne had a novel approach to the still life and once stated, "I will astonish Paris with an apple." I'll do a twist on this using Newton's instead. A traditional still life, by its very name, has no movement. By having a studio go into free fall, objects on the roof freeze from the perspective of a viewer inside the room, as again they would be falling at the same rate as the roof and the rest of the room. Hence, a still life is paradoxically created by adding accelerated motion to the work.
Returning to Pollock: in lieu of a wordy title, Pollock chose numbers for his compositions, like 12 or 1. Lee Krasner stated, "Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a painting for what it is: pure painting." His painting No. 5 was damaged by movers, which required Pollock to subsequently repair it. When I hear No. 5, I immediately think of a famous axiom from geometry: Euclid's 5th Postulate. An esoteric statement about lines intersecting seems pretty far afield, but it turns out to relate deeply to gravity.
Once we understand gravity locally, as we do now from the aforementioned, how does it work globally? For this, Einstein's model relied heavily on a strange new geometry developed by the brilliant 19th-century mathematician Bernhard Riemann (who is often referenced due to his unrelated and famous hypothesis linked to prime numbers). Riemann's work was the culmination of generations of mathematicians wrestling with Euclid's 5th Postulate. Mirroring the language in the Pollock anecdote and speaking very loosely, Euclid's axiom needed to be "fixed" (more precisely replaced) to apply to curved space.
How do I use these observations in my art? In several of my works, I have an abstractly shaped studio in free fall. I then drip paint outside the studio, but not inside, hinting at Pollock's process being thwarted. In my work Pollock Stymied No. 5, I then smudge the paint, referencing the damage to Pollock's masterpiece, and then drip paint (outside the studio) again to repair it.
As the art world celebrates two major retrospectives, Newton's 300th anniversary should remind us that when engaging the art giants of the past, maybe we should stand on the shoulders of those from math.