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The Crisis Of Jackson Pollock’S Mural As A Painting, Michael Schreyach

Michael Schreyach

Critics frequently describe Pollock’s allover painted fields, especially those he began producing after 1947, as absorbing or engulfing the viewer, occasioning a sensation of being immersed within an all-encompassing visual environment. His paintings are said to establish so powerful a continuity between viewer and painting that the distinction between them collapses, generating a feeling of what the psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig notoriously described as “undifferentiated oceanic envelopment.”¹ Pollock’s works, he continued, “enveloped the spectator inside the picture plane,” producing a “manic experience of mystic oneness.”² In them, “pictorial space advances and engulfs [the viewer] in a multi-dimensional unity where …