Art & Creativity Quote by Jackson Pollock

Abstract painting is abstract is a tautology that doubles as a dare. Pollock isn’t defining a genre so much as stripping away the viewer’s usual escape routes: story, subject, easy symbolism. “It confronts you” frames the canvas as an encounter, not an illustration. In the age of photojournalism and Hollywood narrative, that’s a radical demand: stand here, now, with the thing itself.

The anecdote about the reviewer is Pollock at his most sly. “No beginning or any end” was meant as an insult because it violates the critic’s default model of a painting as a composed journey, with entry points, focal hierarchies, and closure. Pollock hears it as accidental accuracy. His drip paintings refuse the old syntax of pictorial time; there’s no privileged moment, no “main event” to decode. You can’t read them like a sentence, only experience them like weather or music: immersive, continuous, indifferent to your need for a plot.

The subtext is also defensive pride. Mid-century America was still learning how to look at abstraction, and critics often treated it as a prank or a void. Pollock flips that around: if the work has no beginning and end, it’s because it’s operating on a different logic, one that matches the scale and restlessness of the postwar moment. The insult becomes the point. The painting doesn’t guide you. It holds its ground until you do.