Controlled Chaos

Jackson Pollock spread huge canvases on the floor and dripped, poured, and flung paint from above. He divided the public. In August 1949 Life magazine ran a feature headlined "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" — the article practically dared you to say yes. Skeptics went the other way and reached for the cheap dismissal: it was a fraud, and anyway, a child could do this.

A physicist named Richard Taylor took that insult seriously and decided to test it.

Pollock's canvases look random, but they aren't. Taylor argued they carry the mark of fractal geometry — the same repeating, self-similar structure you see in coastlines, lightning, and tree branches. Look closer at a coastline and you find smaller bays shaped like the big ones. Pollock's drips do something similar across scales.

Be careful here, though: this is a contested test, not a settled fact. When other physicists ran the numbers, even a quick childlike sketch could register as 'fractal' under Taylor's own box-counting measure — and real Pollocks turned out to span too narrow a range of scales to count as truly fractal. So a toddler's finger painting won't fail some clean math test. What it usually lacks is the built-up, multi-scale density of Pollock's mature surfaces — the part the next pages are really about.