On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow The Legend of Jackson Pollock Predictably, the legend of Jackson Pollock has returned to haunt the large Jackson Pollock retrospective now installed at the Museum of...
...Certainly, Pollock's drawings of the period are savage and exuberant variations upon the screaming women, tortured horses and sinister bulls that figure so prominently in Picasso's anthology of destruction, violence and sex...
...They did, however, accomplish something else: pure abstraction on an expansive, decorative scale...
...With its vaguely figurative allusions it sums up the early Picassoid influences while its broad looping rhythms, all-over design and grandiose scale anticipate the large-scale drip paintings on which Pollock's vanguard reputation is established...
...And the style worked most successfully in the black and white, rather than in the colored, versions...
...It was this culture that served Pollock's painting and, as graphically demonstrated in the Modern's exhibition, now casts his work into a paradoxical role...
...One gets the impression that Picasso's Guernica (painted in 1937, it was exhibited in this country in 1939 and has remained here since) as well as the works that preceded and followed it, provided the indispensable text for Pollock's distraught imagery and much-loosened Cubist syntax...
...A decade later, the Pollock legend????once so vital to the cause of his painting????no longer provokes a sense of urgency and commitment...
...The influences of Miro and the Mexican muralists, then active in New York, were assimilated into Pollock's art as it reached a period of authority in the early '40s...
...What seems an obviously seminal painting today is the large Mural of 1943, commissioned by Miss Guggenheim for her apartment and now in the collection of the University of Iowa...
...Except for the radical innovations of the later '40s and early '50s, Pollock's art as a whole seems decidedly oriented toward European painting, while his drip paintings?which generated a school of imitators during his lifetime????begin to appear as something of a "sport" within the context of the conceptual and formalistic modes that have overtaken American painting...
...THE TENDENCY is tO See Pol-lock's early works as a mere preliminary to his essential contribution to modern painting????the decorative splendor and audacity of the large drip paintings like One, Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm...
...His celebrated "drip"' method, the expansive scale of his canvases, were seen as the hammering strokes of genius, forging a radical new style which influenced the subsequent work of both the American and European vanguards...
...For Surrealism held out two options to modern painting...
...The tragic circumstance of his death in an automobile accident only served to embellish the legend of a moody, violent, sensitive man, given to bouts of drunkenness and barroom roughhousing...
...For force and awkwardness though, Pollock's early works can only be compared with Cezanne's disordered early canvases...
...But while Pollock was apotheosized as the man who had put American painting on the international map, he was also vilified as the artist who had flung a pot of paint in the public's face...
...It seems evident that the figure was the real source of power and romantic violence in Pollock's painting...
...One especially notes the study after El Greco's Coronation of the Virgin that applies the lessons of Cubism to the baroque rhythms of the Spanish master...
...The current retrospective fixes this double irony...
...Pollock was, and is still, considered the modern American master...
...The fate of an innovator is a complex one...
...But Pollock's most celebrated paintings must be seen in the context of his struggle to produce a figurative imagery that was somehow modern and yet freed from the strictures of Cubist practice...
...The range of the drip technique was also limited...
...The largest exhibition of Pollock's work ever assembled, it includes 172 paintings, drawings and prints...
...The other option, a less publicized feature of the movement but one that was implicit in its program, was that it sustained the figurative as the only viable means for dealing with erotic content during a period of increasing abstraction...
...other movements, and a host of younger American painters and sculptors have moved into the arena of international art that Pollock and his contemporaries opened up...
...Number Thirty-Two (1950) with its tangled skeins of black paint spreading outward to form a network of ganglia provides a series of incidents locked into a decisive formal structure...
...ON ART By James R. Mellow The Legend of Jackson Pollock Predictably, the legend of Jackson Pollock has returned to haunt the large Jackson Pollock retrospective now installed at the Museum of Modern Art...
...But they represent, I think, an accommodation for a painter who never quite satisfied his figurative ambitions...
...The smaller, easel-sized paintings in the drip technique seem cramped and fussy...
...The drip paintings did not succeed on this score, since they had to discard the nagging figurative problems to which Pollock returned again and again...
...It was less a matter of having brought the breadth of the great American outdoors into painting than of being characterized by the peculiar combination of European influences prevailing in New York's vanguard art circles during the middle and early '30s...
...It is precisely for this reason that Pollock was drawn more to the Surrealistic phases of Picasso's art than to his earlier structural exercises...
...It is here, I think, that Surrealism was crucial to his efforts to resolve the problem...
...In the years Pollock devoted to the style, he seems to have explored all of its possibilities: the mottled, softened textures of One, the hazy fineness of Lavender Mist, the restricted formalisms of Blue Poles...
...As a painter who preferred compositions full of roiling arabesques and mythic imagery transposed into rural American settings, Benton was ideally suited to Pollock's early romantic tendencies...
...The really pivotal figure, however, was Picasso...
...The fact is that the most savage of Pollock's paintings are those in which the violence is done to a figurative image...
...That he returned to the figurative problem after the drip technique????first in oversized black and white drawings such as Number Twenty-Seven and Echo (both 1951), and in the more painterly though less successful exercises of Ocean Greyness and Sleeping Effort (1953)????is significant...
...The work in the current exhibition does not support this view...
...Beginning in-auspiciously with the dark, muddled paintings done under the influence of the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, with whom Pollock studied at the Art Students League, the exhibition then shifts to a whole series of studies from the old masters????el Greco, Rubens, Michelangelo????in which Pollock attempts to research the past according to modern doctrines...
...Having dispensed with the customary means of painting, he danced out the rhythm of his feelings in splatters of paint, in whiplashes of color strewn over canvases that were either stretched out on the floor or tacked against the walls...
...At that time Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and Matisse commanded the attention of the New York art world????if not always the establishment????and they strongly influenced Pollock's oeuvre...
...By the time Pollock was taken up and exhibited by Peggy Guggenheim in the early '40s, he had consolidated his style and extended it beyond literal imagery into a more imaginative and controlled blend of figure and abstraction...
...The real struggle in Pollock's art was the attempt to make over this violent, and largely borrowed, imagery into a modern style that was both American and the equivalent of its European sources...
...It was precisely upon this contradictory ambition that much of Pollock's work was intent...
...That Pollock's figurative paintings have a considerable erotic ambience is no less surprising than the fact that it can be found so readily in much of Picasso's works...
...the method demanded scale...
...The large drip paintings have a decisive elegance, yet shorn of the legend, they hardly seem emblems of violence...
...One thing more seems certain...
...His Americanness was circumstantial rather than indigenous...
...Critics have seen this action as one of supreme violence committed upon the body of traditional painting...
...Writing of "The Late Thirties in New York," Clement Greenberg has observed that "by 1940, Eighth Street had caught up with Paris as Paris had not yet caught up with herself, and that a handful of then obscure New York painters possessed the ripest painting culture of the day...
...But where Cezanne's struggle to bring a violent imagination to task was finally resolved by the most rigid and painstaking structuralism, Pollock never quite devised a comparable architecture...
...It was during this process that Pollock described himself as being most "in" the painting...
...Abstract Expressionism has relinquished center-stage...
...Pollock was the cowboy out of the West who took the Eastern art establishment by storm...
...His death in 1956, at the age of 44, put an end to a world-renowned and controversial career...
...It was felt his act had abolished the old, measured sensibilities of easel painting...
...The legend has become ancient history...
...One notes, too, that the influence of Benton was far less gratuitous than later commentators like to think...
...With the diminution of the legend, the special American character that was supposed to be an essential ingredient in Pollock's achievement also must be re-evaluated...
...The first was the idea of automatism????the painter could deal straight from the unconscious and whatever issued from that source was, by definition, right...
...In these latter paintings, Pollock abandoned the traditional instrument, the brush, and poured the paint from cans or worked with sticks, flinging the paint across the surface of the canvas as he moved around its perimeter...
Vol. 50 • April 1967 • No. 9
