Death of a Painter

...he makes his life work an outcry of protest...

...Some day, sociologists will study this strange new interest in the most difficult modern art, which takes years of special study (not to mention special aptitude) to understand, by periodicals aimed at the mass mind...

...Let a serious artist feel cut off from most of the life around him (which is usually how he feels today), and the chances are that he will also feel a need to compensate for his deep sense of deprivation by expressing himself more violently and more histrionically (and more originally) than would be necessary if he could live in harmony with nature, history and his fellow man...

...and in the circumstances they can hardly be condemned, but the esthetic and moral price of such surrender is usually suicidal...

...He was also praised in little magazines, by more serious critics, but most collectors today are reassured in direct proportion to the circulation of the words which tell them what to buy...

...When a prominent American Negro author left for France, his publisher expressed the fear, within my hearing, that he would never write as well in exile because "he won't suffer as much...

...He had embraced—and been embraced by—a way of life that could lead only to disaster...

...There was much pathos in Jackson Pollock, but there was also courage and seed...

...In its headlong embrace of technology, our country is the real advance guard of an experience that all mankind must now pass through, since all mankind has plainly declared for the many material advantages of technology, whatever its psychological penalties and whatever the suffering it brings to sensitive minorities...

...This man died the victim of cultural maladjustment...

...It may even be heroic that he should do so...

...Sometimes they have been known to accept publicity as a substitute for a slowly recognized social function, a hard-won place in a cultural tradition, a chance to mature slowly...

...Our most exciting adventures into the unknown world would be impossible without such unreasoning disregard of self...

...it has been produced under circumstances that may soon prevail everywhere...

...Recently, as I was able to observe during two years in Europe, American painters have been taken more seriously abroad than in the past...

...Death of a Painter By Gerald Sykes Author, "Children of Light" and other novels When I returned recently from Paris to my home in East Hampton, New York—another art center—the death of my neighbor Jackson Pollock in an automobile accident was only a month old...

...The artist is consumed by his loneliness, and his art customarily becomes more and more personal...

...Too inarticulate to express himself otherwise, he fabricated a life on canvas —and became a legend to others similarly short-changed...

...Only out of such heedless experimentalism is produced in time a new style...

...Even in Paris there is some mention of a style americain, in abstract painting, which deserves respect...

...This does not alter the fact that, by and large, all good American painters are still social outsiders in a way that is not true of good French painters, who have a serious national position that only an old and distinctly eye-minded country can confer...

...It was a mark of Jackson Pollock's compulsive heroism that, even when he had become famous and could easily have become rich, he did not forsake his despair...

...The periodicals' motives seem fairly clear...

...He had also become a national symbol, as certain unfortunate attacks on him in the press made only too clear...

...A symbol of what...

...His fellow painters, particularly those of the same "abstract expressionist" school, seemed dazed, grieved and chastened...

...After the article in Life, Pollocks sold better...

...They want to belong...

...Nothing is so wearing, or so likely to produce in time a guilty conscience, as life on the periphery of a society that is eminently successful at its material tasks...

...Only by being internally as tough as the world around him—yet without losing the tenderness that is his raison d'etre?can the artist hope to survive today...

...The real reason why American painters—and American writers and composers, for that matter—are being taken more seriously abroad is that these sensitive and gifted people have been tossed defenseless into the conditions of modern technological life, with none of the cushions and buffers that older civilizations provide against raw experience...

...The huckster is now perfectly at home in the museum...

...his agony creates a new style...

...We Americans live in an extremely practical world where the lion's share of plastic prestige goes to commercial artists...

...These circumstances are necessarily destructive to artists and put a higher premium than ever upon a complex consciousness...

...There was no way out for that inconsolable man...

...and in our own times an overall American tendency toward mechanized conformity has produced a number of artists of uncompromising individuality...

...The leap from his Wyoming naivete to his 8th Street prometheanism was too abrupt to permit any time for living...

...Moralists who equate despair with sin, and psychologists who equate it with neurosis, may dispute such an attitude, but if they are honest or half-way human they will have to respect it...

...It is possible that all avantgardisme is the child of despair...

...He is therefore a natural prey to despair and to cure-all promises...

...That is, unless it is purely political or social...

...he would rather live in hell than in any false heaven...

...That is difficult to say, but I believe the answer becomes clearer when his kind of avant-gardisme is seen in historical perspective...

...Similar fears have often been expressed for white American artist-expatriates...

...most readers are antagonized by modern art but enjoy being antagonized, and they also like quick information and ready-made opinions on a subject that would normally require years of hard work...

...A painter cannot live, however, without selling paintings, and today he sells much more easily if he receives publicity—and publicity in mass media...

...A familiar example is the sensuality of the Near East—so intense and far-reaching to those who have witnessed it—which produced, by reaction, stern religions and fierce moralities that have spread all over the earth...

...In the United States, on the other hand, a predominant puritanism produced the anti-puritan Walt Whitman, with his enormous liberating influence on later poetry everywhere...

...The first job of the artist today is to suffer a complex new torture, and we give up on him very quickly when he ducks it...

...One of them said, "It's as if it had happened to me...

...That is another reason why American art is being scanned abroad with newly respectful eyes...

...All attempt at adjustment disappears...

...Those who buy new painters like to be assured that they are not throwing their money away, if they do not buy solely for pleasure and if their taste is not entirely certain...

...And at home one of my outstanding impressions, on my return, was that some of our most intransigent painters had begun to sell considerably better, have babies, buy houses and cars, get more lucrative teaching jobs...

...As for the artists, they usually detest what the periodicals write about them but recognize its business value...

...The source of our artistic vigor, which other nations are beginning to admire in the plastic arts as well as in literature and music, is pain...

...Our most original style is a fascinating scream of anguish, with a brand new tonality, squealed by extra-tender guinea pigs (or scapegoats) in a vast and perhaps blind social experiment...

...That is why some serious painters come to believe that publicity can be a panacea for both their financial wounds and those of another nature...

...One of the most important events in Jackson Pollock's career was an article in Life which suggested that he might be America's most important painter...

...Jackson Pollock was one of the most spectacular—and most interesting—of these artists...

...Their extraordinary sense of team loss appeared to mean that he had represented, with a talent and a singlemindedness that caught everyone's imagination, not only a kind of art but a way of life...

...If protest continues in such conditions, it tends to become wilfully nearsighted and neurotic...

...One reason why it is difficult to generalize about nations is that a national main current sometimes produces minority backwaters that end by being more important than the popular torrent that made them necessary...