America painted its demons: When pollock and rothko freed the canvas

A few hundred miles away, in a bare-walled New York loft, another man works in silence. Mark Rothko has hung a canvas nearly ten feet tall on the wall. He steps back, then forward, squinting. He barely touches the surface. With a brush as wide as his hand, he spreads layers of blood-red and pale ochre, making them shimmer until they seem to breathe. He wants the viewer to stand eighteen inches from the canvas—close enough for the colors to envelop them like mist. "I am not an abstract artist," he once said. "I am only interested in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom."

These two men, seemingly opposites—one dancing around his canvas like a shaman, the other motionless before his rectangles of color like a priest at an altar—nevertheless changed the course of modern art. In postwar America, as the country asserted itself as the new global superpower, they turned New York into the art capital of the world, dethroning Paris. Their movement, abstract expressionism, was not merely a style. It was a revolution—a way of painting not what one sees, but what one feels. And sometimes, what one fears.

01The floor as arena: when Pollock killed the easel

There is something almost sacred in the way Jackson Pollock prepared his canvases. No stretcher, no frame: he simply spread a large piece of raw canvas on the studio floor, as if unrolling a carpet before a ceremony. This seemingly simple act contained an entire philosophy. By abandoning the easel, Pollock rejected five centuries of pictorial tradition. No more perspective, no more studied composition, no more identifiable subject. Just a flat, blank surface, ready to receive the artist’s raw energy.

His tools? Found objects: sticks, knives, syringes, nails. Sometimes he used industrial paint cans directly, puncturing holes in the bottom to let the color flow. Critics laughed at first. "My five-year-old could do that," they sneered at the openings. Yet when you look closely at Autumn Rhythm (1950), you realize that every drop, every splatter is the result of absolute control. Pollock left nothing to chance. He walked around the canvas, leaned in, stepped back, like a dancer measuring his steps. The traces of his movements are still visible—here, a shoe print; there, a thicker streak where he pressed harder.

What strikes you in these works is their complete lack of hierarchy. No foreground, no background, no center. Just an infinite network of interlaced lines, as if Pollock had captured the very energy of life. Some saw the chaos of the unconscious; others, the trace of a primitive ritual. He himself said simply: "I am nature." A phrase that sums up his entire approach. He did not represent the world. He became part of it.

02Color as emotion: Rothko and the silence that screams

If Pollock was the demigod hurling his fury onto the canvas, Mark Rothko was the medium channeling the vibrations of the soul. His paintings are not looked at—they are felt. Take No. 61 (Rust and Blue) (1953): two superimposed rectangles, one a rusted red, the other a deep blue, floating on an ochre ground. From a distance, it resembles an abstract landscape. But step closer, as Rothko demanded, and something strange happens. The edges of the shapes seem to breathe, the colors pulse like a heartbeat. You feel as if you’re plunging into infinite space—or perhaps standing at the edge of a precipice.

Rothko worked in semi-darkness, illuminating his canvases with dim light to better judge the effects. He applied paint in successive layers, sometimes mixing rabbit-skin glue or dry pigments to achieve that particular luminosity. The result is not a smooth surface, but a kind of living membrane, where each layer of color shines through the others. Look closely, and you’ll see brushstrokes, irregularities, accidents. Nothing is perfect, and that is precisely what gives these works their power.

For Rothko, painting was a quasi-religious experience. He wanted his canvases to provoke a physical reaction in the viewer—shivers, tears, a sense of vertigo. "I am not a decorator," he scoffed at those who saw his works as mere pleasing compositions. His colors were not chosen at random. Red, for him, evoked passion and violence; blue, transcendence; black, death. His final works, dark and oppressive, seem to foreshadow his own tragic end. In 1970, ravaged by depression and alcoholism, he slit his wrists in his studio. On his easel, an unfinished canvas: a black rectangle on a gray ground.

03The CIA and the Cold War of brushes

Few people know that abstract expressionism was not just an artistic revolution. It was also a weapon in the Cold War. In the early 1950s, as the United States and the USSR clashed on every front, the CIA saw in these canvases a unique opportunity. Unlike Soviet socialist realism, which celebrated workers and collective farms, American art was free, chaotic, individual. In 1958, the Museum of Modern Art organized a traveling exhibition titled The New American Painting, which toured eight European countries. The works of Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning were presented as proof of American cultural superiority.

Most of the artists were unaware of this manipulation. Many, in fact, leaned left—some were even communists. Rothko, for example, had been a member of the John Reed Club, a Marxist organization. But in McCarthy-era America, openly expressing political views was dangerous. So they took refuge in abstraction, a universal language that allowed them to express anxiety without naming the enemy.

This instrumentalization of art had paradoxical consequences. On one hand, it catapulted the abstract expressionists onto the international stage. On the other, it trapped them in the image of "official" artists, funded by the government. Pollock, who despised all forms of authority, was deeply affected. "They’re treating me like an American product," he grumbled. Rothko, for his part, flatly refused to let his works be used for political purposes. When invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1958, he insisted his paintings be hung in a separate room, without any national label.

04The studio as confessional

Behind the myths and legends were broken men. Pollock, the enfant terrible of American art, was a chronic alcoholic who spent his nights in Greenwich Village bars. Rothko, the philosopher of color, was consumed by depression. Their studios were both refuges and battlegrounds.

Pollock’s, a converted barn in East Hampton, was a chaos of rolled canvases, spilled paint cans, and empty bottles. It was there, in 1950, that photographer Hans Namuth captured him at work. The images, published in Life magazine, caused a scandal. They showed Pollock, cigarette dangling from his lips, "dancing" around his canvas like a man possessed. For many, these photos reduced his art to mere spectacle. For others, they finally revealed the truth: painting was a physical act, almost violent.

Rothko, meanwhile, worked in monastic silence. His studio on 69th Street was a bare room, lit by a single window. He listened to Bach or Mozart as he painted, demanding absolute quiet from his assistants. In the 1960s, as his health declined, he began working on increasingly dark canvases. The Blackform Paintings, those black rectangles floating on gray grounds, are often interpreted as harbingers of his death. Yet Rothko rejected any literal reading. "These are not paintings about death," he said. "They are paintings about life—life as it really is, with its shadows and uncertainties."

05Legacy: when art becomes legend

Today, the works of Pollock and Rothko sell for tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars. Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 fetched $140 million in 2006, a record at the time. Rothko’s Seagram Murals, which he had withdrawn from a chic restaurant because he deemed them "unworthy," now hang in the world’s greatest museums. Yet this consecration raises a troubling question: would these artists, who rejected mercantilism and sought a form of the absolute, have accepted seeing their works turned into luxury commodities?

Pollock, who died in a car crash at 44, never lived to see his posthumous glory. Rothko, however, lived long enough to witness the commercialization of his art. In the 1960s, while working on the Houston Chapel—a commission he considered his masterpiece—he was horrified to discover his paintings reproduced on carpets, ties, even plates. "I don’t want my paintings ending up in bourgeois living rooms," he had written. The irony is that this is precisely where they are today.

And yet, despite this co-optation, something of their original rebellion remains. When you stand before Autumn Rhythm at the MoMA, or the Seagram Murals at Tate Modern, you still feel that raw energy, that desperate search for meaning. These canvases are not mere decorations. They are windows into the souls of their creators—and perhaps into our own.

06Epilogue: what we lost, what we gained

Abstract expressionism marked the end of an era. The era when art could still shock, provoke, upend. Today, as museums resemble shopping malls and artists are judged by their market value, one wonders what remains of that revolution.

Perhaps just this: a lesson in humility. Pollock and Rothko remind us that art is not a question of technique, nor even of beauty. It is a question of truth. Theirs was raw, violent, sometimes desperate. But it was authentic. And that is perhaps why it still moves us, seventy years later.

The next time you encounter one of their canvases, don’t just look at it. Step closer. Let the colors envelop you. Listen to Rothko’s silence, or Pollock’s tumult. And ask yourself: what do I feel, really? It is in that unanswerable question that their entire genius lies.