"The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces"
About this Quote
The subtext is strategic. Pollock is translating what could look like chaos into a vocabulary of necessity. If the work is “inner forces,” then the drips and tangles aren’t accidents; they’re recordings, like seismograph lines tracking pressure you can’t otherwise see. That move matters in a culture that still treats legibility as a synonym for value. He’s offering a new criterion: authenticity measured by intensity, not clarity.
Context does a lot of the heavy lifting. Postwar America wanted cultural adulthood, and Abstract Expressionism became its loudest proof-of-life: art that didn’t need European subjects or European rules. Pollock’s emphasis on “working” also smuggles in a kind of rugged labor ethic - the painter as a worker, not a decorator - which helped make radical abstraction palatable as something earned.
The brilliance is how he reframes abstraction as realism of a different order. Not realism of objects, but realism of forces: the nervous system, the era’s volatility, the body moving through space. It’s a justification, but it’s also a diagnosis of modern life: the inside is where the action is, because the outside no longer holds still.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Pollock, Jackson. (2026, January 15). The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-modern-artist-is-working-and-expressing-an-102156/
Chicago Style
Pollock, Jackson. "The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-modern-artist-is-working-and-expressing-an-102156/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-modern-artist-is-working-and-expressing-an-102156/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.









