ABSTRACT
In 1950, the photographer and filmmaker Hans Namuth persuaded a reluctant Jackson Pollock to execute one of his famous “action paintings” on a canvas of glass while the camera recorded Pollock’s bodily gyrations from below the transparent pane. Pollock’s body dips as his paint brush drips; and the resulting rhythmic improvisation-we might call it “dip and drip”—seems to parallel the rhythms of the jazz recordings that Pollock often listened to as he painted (e.g., the music of Fats Waller, T -Bone Walker, Jelly Roll Morton.) Although neither Pollock nor Namuth realized it at the time, their collaboration had produced one of the world’s most eccentric dance films. It demonstrated (in a way the paintings alone rarely do) that abstract expressionism was animated in part by a desire to transform painting into dancing.
