Behind the drip.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Artifact - Art historian studies Jackson Pollock's "drip technique" for regualr patterns - Brief Article

DO JACKSON POLLOCK'S notorious post-war "drip" canvases--above is a detail from his famous Number 22--actually contain a bidden mathematical pattern? According to a story in Discover magazine, the physicist and art historian Richard Taylor is convinced that they do. Taylor argues that Pollock's work is not the random visual chaos that his critics derided, but instead reflects the logic of chaos theory and fractal geometry. That is, unlike other spontaneous-drip artists, Pollock created canvases with a single dominant pattern that is repeated, at various magnifications, throughout.

As part of his research, Taylor has invented the "Pollockizer," a mechanical fractal-drip device. Of course, whether Pollock intended his fractal results is unknown. What is demonstrable are the repeated patterns, the eye's preference for such subtle variation over...