There’s a famous short film clip, made in 1951, that shows Jackson Pollock energetically painting on the floor. It’s rare that we get to witness the act of creation. We see him in black and white, shuttling back and forth the length of a tacked-down stretch of canvas, dripping and flinging paint from a can. "Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement," the voice-over says, but the picture seems to tell a different story. This is the revolutionary "action painting" that is so enchanting to art historians. In 2000, actor and director Ed Harris made an excellent movie about Pollock, in which he re-created the artist’s painting technique to perfection. Or did he? After all, none of Harris’ paintings would ever be mistaken for a Pollock. We can watch an artist for hours on end, but we will never know what’s in his head.

A painting consists of innumerable decisions. No matter how rapturously we might write about the process, every artist worth the name is focused on his destination, the end result. He probably doesn’t have a name for it because if painters thought in words, they’d be poets. Pollock said he had "no fear of making changes, destroying the image, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess." Even as he was slopping the paint on (as it seems in the movie), his mind was telling him "yes, no, here, there." It wasn’t telling him "maybe." We can see where he decides to go, laboriously spattering paint. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t tell us—and no artist will ever tell you—what he elected not to do.

"It is impossible to make a forgery of Jackson Pollock’s work," Time magazine critic Robert Hughes claimed in 1982. No one could imitate his style either. Back in the Sixties there was a college kid on every floor staining paint a la Frankenthaler or masking it like Mondrian. But nobody knew how to drip without making a mess, and that is because, unlike Pollock, they had no idea in mind.

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) is a picture in which Pollock does everything right. Directly on the unprimed canvas, he laid down a layer of black lines, rather sinister, like barbed wire. "Deal with this," they say—and watch out because in marches a tangled mass of broken brown angles, gobs of white, flashing accents of brown, white and turquoise, like the aftermath of splitting an atom. Underneath, the dark wires play foil to the lighter colors on top, creating depth (a technique as old as the Old Masters). The whole melee quivers with a palpable electrical charge. But is it a mess? No. What draws us irrevocably into the painting is its lightness of being—the oscillating loops and curves and the transparent, airy spaces between them. Pollock dripped the paint because he wanted it to travel through space before it hit the canvas’ planetary surface.

Pollock started numbering his paintings because he thought his titles gave away too much. Autumn Rhythm spills its secrets as soon as we remember Pollock’s statement, "I am nature." He lived with Lee Krasner in a farmhouse in Springs, Long Island, in a clearing in the middle of a forest. He realized that to every season, to all life, there is a rhythm. If we wish to free-associate, Pollock’s pictures crackle with energy. To some they look like deep space photography. To others they look like neurons and synapses, the infinitesimal gaps in the brain where thoughts jump like sparks.
 
Hans Namuth, who photographed Pollock at work in his studio, recalled him painting continuously for half an hour, never looking up. Namuth marveled at Pollock’s intensity and wondered how long he could sustain it. At last, Pollock declared, "This is it." Alas, we will never know the thought that tripped that switch.