Painting: The New Ancestors

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From the beginning of his life, as the son of a ne'er-do-well West Coast farmer. Pollock seems to have been a depressed soul. "This so-called happy part of one's life, youth, to me is a bit of damnable hell," he confessed at the age of 18. Throughout his later life, he fought a constant battle with drink, miserably shy when sober, painfully rambunctious when drunk.

Sea Change. Yet somehow, particularly between 1946 and 1950, he produced a series of magnificent canvases, whirligigs of dazzling and dizzying balance.

"Most modern painters," Pollock once said, "work from within. The unconscious is a very important side of modern art." No other artist has ever utilized the unconscious as brilliantly as he. Full Fathom Five is not the largest or most significant Pollock at the current exhibition, but it has a special fascination, for it contains in embryo the later paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Its panorama of steely swirls is underlaid with nails, cigarettes, tacks, buttons and other detritus—yet all made lovely, as it were, by lying drowned at the bottom of a sea of paint, vividly evocative of Ariel's song in The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made,

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change . . .

Into something rich and strange.