"New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture"
About this Quote
Pollock isn’t politely asking for permission to break the rules; he’s declaring the old rules structurally incapable of holding the present. The opening line reads like a manifesto in work boots: “New needs need new techniques.” It’s tautological on purpose, a blunt refusal of nostalgia-as-standard. If the century has changed the scale of experience, the tools of representation have to change with it. Otherwise art becomes a museum reenactment, technically skilled and culturally irrelevant.
The subtext is defensive and aggressive at once. Pollock is answering the predictable charge leveled at modernism: that it’s sloppy, unserious, even fraudulent compared with Renaissance draftsmanship. His counter is strategic: it’s not that modern artists can’t paint like the past; it’s that painting like the past is a category error. You don’t illustrate the airplane with the visual grammar designed for a world that had never left the ground.
Context matters here: mid-century America, war-shadowed and technology-drunk, where the atom bomb rewired the psyche and mass media rewired attention. Pollock’s list - airplane, atom bomb, radio - is a compressed history of speed, annihilation, and disembodied voice. Those forces don’t just add new subject matter; they fracture perception itself. That’s why his drip paintings aren’t “about” airplanes or bombs in any literal sense. They behave like the age: decentralized, high-velocity, anxious, all-over, refusing the comforting hierarchy of figure and background.
The line is also a pitch for legitimacy. Abstract Expressionism wanted to be understood not as fashion but as necessity: a visual technology for a new kind of reality.
The subtext is defensive and aggressive at once. Pollock is answering the predictable charge leveled at modernism: that it’s sloppy, unserious, even fraudulent compared with Renaissance draftsmanship. His counter is strategic: it’s not that modern artists can’t paint like the past; it’s that painting like the past is a category error. You don’t illustrate the airplane with the visual grammar designed for a world that had never left the ground.
Context matters here: mid-century America, war-shadowed and technology-drunk, where the atom bomb rewired the psyche and mass media rewired attention. Pollock’s list - airplane, atom bomb, radio - is a compressed history of speed, annihilation, and disembodied voice. Those forces don’t just add new subject matter; they fracture perception itself. That’s why his drip paintings aren’t “about” airplanes or bombs in any literal sense. They behave like the age: decentralized, high-velocity, anxious, all-over, refusing the comforting hierarchy of figure and background.
The line is also a pitch for legitimacy. Abstract Expressionism wanted to be understood not as fashion but as necessity: a visual technology for a new kind of reality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Jackson Pollock; cited on Wikiquote (Jackson Pollock page). Original publication/interview not specified there. |
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