Composing Abstract Expressionism: On Jazz & Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock, White Light, 1954, enamel on canvas, 266.7 x 525.8. cm. New York City, MoMA.
Spontaneous improvisation is a term just as easily applied to music as to art. Sure, the composition of some pieces–be they Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelungen” or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa–takes years. But there are also ones that originate instantaneously, evidently springing out from the unconscious, the source, the muse, or whatever you wish to call it. Legend has it Derek Bailey improvised entire performances in the moment, much like Picasso created Visage: The Head of a Faun in minutes, and Andre Masson churned out automatic drawings in seconds. While these capture the spontaneity inherent in art and music as distinct practices, there comes a moment when their rhythms sync. This is the case of Abstract Expressionism.
Termed by the American critic Robert Coates, Abstract Expressionism originated in New York City in the aftermath of World War II. It initiated a radical departure from traditional forms and modes of representation, privileging raw emotion and instinctual gesture over precise representation. It was thanks to this, one might add, that New York replaced Paris as the world’s cultural capital. Under Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, and Arshile Gorky, among others, Abstract Expressionism became the hallmark of the New York School. Between 1943 and 1965, it revolutionised our very approach to art making: by allowing dripping, pouring, gestural brushwork, and other experimental techniques, it rendered the canvas a stage for the outpour of emotion, movement, and subconscious impulses. Painting itself became performative, and works came to matter as much for their technique as for their final image.
But there is a side to it that remains unexplored: its founding in music. Jazz, in particular, played a key role in the shaping of Abstract Expressionism. The free improvisations of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor resonated with painters who rejected formal composition in favour of a more direct, intuitive engagement with their medium. Jazz performers and Abstract Expressionists thus came to embrace identical principles: improvisation, real-time invention, call-and-response, personal expression, and emotional intensity. Form was buried under chaotic streaks of paint, and so were predetermined structure and other canonical constraints. The resulting works did not just echo jazz; they incorporated its ethos, exchanging structure for sensation, form for freedom, and expectation for experimentation.
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950,
oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas,
122.4 x 96.9 cm. New York City, The MET.
Jackson Pollock, in particular, embedded the improvisational spirit of jazz into his drip paintings. Created on the floor, with literal drips of paint falling onto the canvas, these works allowed the artist to physically engage with his work, much as a jazz musician would engage with their instrument. It is unsurprising, then, that they echoed the process of music: while their technique, like jazz’s, emphasised process over premeditation, their rhythmic flicks and splatters echoed the unpredictable, spontaneous bursts of a saxophone solo. Like Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” or Jimmy Yancey's boogie-woogie piano lines, Pollock’s paintings rejected traditional structure in favour of emotional immediacy and instinctive flow. Works like Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950) and Convergence (1952) embody this well: layered, tangled, chaotic yet intentional, they buzz with the raw energy of a jazz improvisation. Even more strikingly, they stand on the pillars of the artist’s overlooked discipline: without internalized structures, familiarity with the history of art and its methods, and years of practice, Pollock would have never been able to devise and execute his instinctive techniques, much as a jazz musician could never indulge in notationless improvisation without a preexisting mastery of their instrument.
But contrary to popular belief, Pollock wasn’t channeling Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie mid-painting. In fact, he wasn’t even listening to music in the studio. As his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, made clear, his studio did not have electricity until 1953, meaning that his paintings must have been created in silence. She continued.
“He would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records,” she recalled, “not just for days—day and night for three days running until you thought you would climb the roof! The house would shake. Jazz? He thought it was the only other really creative thing happening in this country.”
His tastes were rooted in earlier jazz—Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Yancey—, the music that pulsed through America in the '30s and '40s and foreshadowed bebop. B.H. Friedman, Pollock’s friend and biographer, even recalled trying—and failing—to get him into Parker and Gillespie. Throughout his life, the artist remained a fan of jazz’s early foundations–the swell of a trumpet or the rolling syncopation of swing; and it was they that inspired his sense of rhythm and geared him towards expressive release.
Interestingly, however, the one time his work was explicitly tied to jazz, it wasn’t one of Pollock’s drip paintings, but a later work of thick impasto–paint applied so densely it stands out from the canvas–and staccato brushstrokes: White Light (1954). In 1961, Ornette Coleman chose it for the cover of Free Jazz, a studio album of his improvised saxophone performances. That choice was telling. Instead of choosing a flowing, gestural painting like the aforementioned Autumn Rhythm, Coleman went for a work that mirrored the dense, dissonant sound of his own performances.
Cover of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, 1961.
Despite this, Pollock resisted jazz affiliations: when prompted to select a sound for a 1950 movie, which depicted him painting, he disavowed jazz entirely. Instead, he opted for a spare, rhythmic cello-based score by the avant-garde composer Morton Feldman. And no wonder. As the composer later shared, he scored for the film “as he would for choreography,” evoking Pollock’s rhythmic movements through sound.
In the end, the link between Jackson Pollock and jazz–and Abstract Expressionism and music– isn’t literal. It is philosophical. They both shared an improvisational ethos, characterised by a common impulse toward immediacy, unpredictability, and embodied emotion. Pollock, in particular, painted as performers played: in real time, without a score, prioritising expression over resolution. And if Abstract Expressionism and jazz appear to embrace the same spontaneity and speak the same language, often in dialogue, it’s because both channelled the same sensation and transcribed it before it calcified into form.
