“I don’t use the accident—’cause I deny the accident. I believe it was Freud who said there’s no such thing as an accident”
—Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock lost his head speeding
north on Springs-Fireplace Road in his green
Oldsmobile convertible. He was
angry. He was drunk. He had two young
women with him when his sports car slammed
into the trunk of an oak tree. What
absolute horror, dying this way,
your head ripped from your body. And yet,
for the abstract painter this manner
of death epitomized his method—
fiercely crisp, a gesture stripped of all
pretense, the artist’s wild brokenness
strewn on a breathing canvas with one
hard swing of the wheel. So how can you
gaze at a piece like Blue Poles and not
envision the twisted shapes of steel
and chrome, a clotted landscape of blood
spatter, broken glass and bone, the grove
of trees set back a bit from the road—
knowing any one of those dark streaks
could be the spot where the drip master
intended to surrender his soul.
* Pollock painted Blue Poles in 1952. He died four years later, in 1956, in a single-car crash. He was decapitated.
