Jackson Pollock, by Deborah Solomon
Gibson, Eric
Because they can indulge a desire to look for the meaning of the artist's work outside the work itself rather than within it, artist's biographies present problems those of other prominent...
...There are some moments of analysis, but they don't go very deep...
...Moreover, with certain artists, a biography may present further obstacles by concentrating on lurid details and scandalous episodes, all at the expense of the person's art, which is then reduced to a visual chronicle of a pathological condition...
...It all makes one wonder why she undertook the project to begin with...
...Then in 1949, Life made him a household word with a story "Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Living Painter in the United States...
...Any biographer of Jackson Pollock faces all these hazards, yet they haven't been much of a deterrent, as the publication of Deborah Solomon's life of the artist—the fifth to date—attests...
...Y et one can imagine no less likely candidate than Pollock for such a crucial role in American art...
...He embodied the two major archetypes of the modern artist, the artist-visionary and the peintre maudit...
...Pollock continues to fascinate, and for obvious reasons...
...This ,in fact turns out to be the book's greatest drawback...
...It worked, and produced some arresting insights...
...Solomon can't make a many-layered connection like that because her viewpoint is too shallow and constricted, and because at root she possesses no real feeling for art or for the creative process...
...American Indian pictographs...
...The effect is to remove Pollock from us, as if behind a mesh screen...
...Pollock's life and his art were each so extreme, and so polarized, that together they pose the question: how could this person, who had so much against him psychologically, and who as apprentice artist showed no particular aptitude for his vocation, have evolved to produce in his celebrated drip paintings work which seemed to exist at the very limit of what art could be, and which was of such pivotal importance to artists of his own and later generations...
...The notion that interlaced and clotted skeins of paint could of themselves carry as high art was one of modernism's boldest gambits...
...This may be because her background is in journalism, rather than art history or criticism, making her inclined to report rather than probe...
...Miro's "allover" composition...
...and the scale and sweep of the murals painted by the Mexicans Siquieros and Orozco in the thirties...
...Yet while gesture was the new idiom Pollock bequeathed to artists of his and later generations, a manner, or rather an approach to painting, was all that could be learned from him...
...For Solomon, the incident proves Pollock's titles are interchangeable, "outright misleading...
...Solomon recounts the story of Pollock's changing a title from Moby Dick to Pasiphae at the suggestion of James Johnson Sweeney, then director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, who thought it a "cliche...
...It broke free of Surrealist imagery and Cubist construction, the dominant influences of the day, dissolving form in a dense, allover web of line that made no overt reference to nature...
...Nor does she tell us anything novel about her subject...
...She gives us the life, but misses the man...
...We never really find out...
...In her new biography, Solomon steers clear of sensationalism, but she never quite answers the central question...
...His efforts culminated in the celebrated paintings of the late forties in which, with broad sweeps of his arm, he poured paint from a can directly onto large canvases laid out on the floor...
...His saturnine temperament and his role in bringing American art into the modernist mainstream combined to elevate him above the ranks of his fellows, conferring on him near-mythic status...
...This is a description of the picture that hung in the Spouter Inn, the picture that stood for Ahab's quest...
...Solomon never persuades us of the necessity of writing another Pollock biography...
...Under the circumstances, it is hard to imagine Pollock lasting much past his fiftieth birthday (he was forty-four when he died) even without the fatal car crash, which in any event was not his first...
...For someone of Pollock's troubled temper, the pressures, expectations, and misunderstandings brought on by his sudden move into the spotlight only made matters worse, isolating him from himself and others and fueling his urge to seek refuge in drink...
...But there is a deeper problem...
...Second, in spite of his celebrity and the growing acceptance of his art among critics in the late forties and early fifties, Pollock was not made materially better off, since sales of his work were virtually non-existent...
...For Pollock, this involved a lengthy process of fusing European and American idioms: the recourse to the unconscious...
...Because they can indulge a desire to look for the meaning of the artist's work outside the work itself rather than within it, artist's biographies present problems those of other prominent individuals do not...
...Worse, he sought relief in drinking, which unleashed a barely contained impulsetoward self-destructiveness, an impulse that finally achieved its goal in 1956, when a car he was driving went off the road, killing him instantly...
...Why is a journalist writing about an artist, particularly Pollock...
...But O'Doherty sees things differently: Pollock's career itself makes a kind of picture not unlike his own: "A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted...
...And finally, by the early fifties, Pollock had exhausted the possibilities of his drip technique and felt dead-ended, uncertain of what direction to go in and sensitive to criticism that in his last pictures, which restore figurative motifs, he was retreating from the vanguard...
...Solomon gives us all of this information in her book...
...Solomon herself doesn't tell us, and there's no outside reason, like an exhibition, an anniversary, or the discovery of fresh material to prompt a new study of Pollock...
...The animating spirit was embodied in the artist himself, making imitation an impossibility...
...Her descriptions of Pollock's paintings all read like good answers to an Introduction to Art History exam, no more, no less, suggesting she's read about but not really looked at the pictures, or that she possesses no real framework to understand them if she has...
...But hers is a facts-only approach that screens out almost all color or insight, leaving us a largely monochrome portrait of the artist...
...Accepting the necessary link between life and art, O'Doherty sought to plumb the meaning of both by situating them in the American historical and cultural landscapes...
...The resulting "gestural" style elevated American art to a new level of abstraction...
...The JACKSON POLLOCK: A BIOGRAPHY Deborah Solomon/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 Eric Gibson 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 artist is present, but intangible...
...Moreover, fatal for a "life," her journalist's training has taught her to suppress any individual literary voice or point of view, the very thing that brings a subject to life, so that all incidents are given equal weight and told in an uninflected monotone...
...Pollock's achievement was to complete the task American art had set for itself a generation earlier, namely to originate an abstract pictorial language the equal of, yet free from overt allegiance to, the forms of European modernism...
...All his life he was so shy and wracked by feelings of inadequacy as to be all but unable to express himself, either verbally or in paint...
...When he finally did manage to do something on canvas, he doubted the value of his efforts...
...We come to the end of the book feeling something is missing...
...This the art critic Brian O'Doherty attempted in his 1974 essay on Pollock, one of eight that appeared in his book American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art...
...To grasp Pollock as a unified whole, to reconcile the polarities between his life and his art, something beyond a simple chronicle is needed...
...Eric Gibson writes on art for the New Criterion...
...His response was to compensate with arrogance, denigrating everyone's work, from his fellow art students' to that of masters such as Klee and Rubens...
...Yet they do...
...In addition, there is about Pollock a central, enduring enigma that more than anything else explains his continuing appeal to biographers...
...He stopped painting for long periods, drank more heavily than ever, and began to deteriorate physically and mentally...
...Its pulsing, mesmeric character has something in common with tribal ceremony, a quality accurately reflective of Pollock's own view of painting as a ritualistic, almost shamanistic act...
...Moby Dick, Lee Krasner reports, was one of Pollock's favorite books—he even called his dog "Ahab...
...All this made Pollock utterly unsuited for the public role he was called upon to play as the first artist-celebrity of the postwar era...
...Like much modern painting, their "beauty" lies in the associative charges they unleash, rather than in anything they attempt to depict...
...The endlessly looping threads of paint set up a sustained, repetitive rhythm which serves alternately to focus and diffuse, build up and contain an explosive inner force that speaks to the deepest reaches of our psyche...
...Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what the marvellous painting meant...
...the title a wry dig at Greenberg's lavish encomiums...
...Once past the haze of formalist criticism, which sees Pollock's pictures solely in terms of exploding the conventions of easel painting, and untransfigured pigment affirming the flatness of the material support, the viewer has access to the pictures' larger meaning...
...First, even as they publicized Pollock and the new art in their feature stories, Time and Life responded to the work with reviews that were openly philistine in their outlook (as, at root, were the features themselves...
...The critic Clement Greenberg singled him out as the finest American artist of the century, thus setting him apart within his circle of artists...
...And with a subject as well documented and complex as this one, that's death to a "life...
...As if this weren't enough, a number of cruel ironies informed this newfound status...
...There could be no "drip school" of any consequence as there had been, for example, a Cubist school in the wake of Picasso and Braque...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
