Antonio Saura, “Notes on Pollock,” translated from Spanish by Isabel Adey, from Saura, Visor sobre artistas 1958–1998 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2001), 9–14, first published in a reduced version as “Notas sobre Pollock,” in Carta de El Paso 4 (1958)

Antonio Saura was one of Spain’s most important avant-garde painters of the twentieth century. Saura’s “Notes on Pollock” represents one of the first theoretical essays on Pollock published in Spain, explaining the artist’s approach to pictorial surface. Between 1951 and 1952, adopting an ascetic approach, Jackson Pollock created a surprising, dramatic series of paintings, using nothing but black liquid paint. The stripped-down approach to the exceptional black paintings is the key to one of Pollock’s most expressive achievements. Pollock deconstructs, reconstructs and recreates, and succeeds to turn a huge, rhythmic tangle of lines into a strong, unified presence. In Pollock’s work, the oriental concept, considered as a living being immersed in a turbulent cosmos, is unified with violent expressiveness, synthesizing a gesture of action and an infinite spatiality on the same surface. Brown and Silver 1 is one of a series of black paintings that Pollock produced between 1951 and 1952 using black enamel paint on completely raw, unprimed canvas.