Alchemy

Painted in 1947, Alchemy captures Jackson Pollock at a moment when he threw out the rulebook. Rather than standing at an easel with a brush, he spread his canvas on the floor and worked over it from every side, pouring and flinging paint until the surface became a dense knot of tangled lines. He mixed in sand and other gritty bits to give the layers real weight and texture. If you study the surface long enough, you may catch faint hints of letters and numbers buried beneath the wild loops of color.

The name suits the picture perfectly. Alchemy was the old dream of turning plain metals into gold, and Pollock seems to be working a similar trick, transforming humble drips of paint into something strange and alive. He belonged to Abstract Expressionism, a wave of artists working in New York after World War II who cared far more about the energy of making a work than about painting anything you could name. These days the canvas hangs at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, still drawing crowds who happily lose themselves in its swirling maze.