On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art POLLOCK WITHOUT DRIPS BY BRADLEY W BLOCH I have a lot of difficulty with Jackson Pollock. He is held as an American master, of course, and his canonization not only signaled the...
...If so, in most cases he fell far short of this objective...
...The thin pigment gathers up in frustrated blotches, obliterating any sense of line...
...Yet whenever I stand in front of one, the little devil of skepticism materializes on my shoulder and whispers, "It's just paint drips...
...That role carries with it a higher set of standards than selling...
...His famous "drip" paintings have an undeniable raw energy...
...With the exception of one Cubist-like exercise in representing the human Figure, they all lack artistic merit...
...Defenders of the Black Paintings maintain that they "unveiled the imagery " that was hidden in his earlier abstractions...
...Looking back through the haze of Neo-Geo and Graffiti Art (remember that...
...Indeed, Pollock had doubts himself...
...As with the drip paintings that preceded them, the paint is poured onto the surface...
...For Pollock it was a dead end...
...On the other, these creations seem so divorced from what we think of as high art that one might understandably wonder why they should be regarded in the same light...
...The later offerings in this section were scarcely better...
...Or had he devised a new visual vocabulary whose potential he had barely begun to cultivate...
...Although grappling with this artist now means first and foremost grappling with his drip paintings, that really cannot be done without a careful consideration of much of his previous effort...
...In 1952 he returned to the drip technique, although his output was from then on much diminished...
...From 1929 to 1931 he studied intently with Thomas Hart Benton, whose epic murals captured the daily activities of America's heartland...
...they humanize him, revealing success to be less inevitable than biographers often like to imply...
...In his case more than that of most artists, a poorly chosen selection can cast a pall on even the work that won him fame...
...Clearly, then, Pollock the wild Abstract Expressionist had his antecedents in Pollock the Regionalist and Pollock the Cubist...
...But nothing in the Pollock show was actually on the market...
...The painting known as Naked Man with Knife (circa 1938-41), for example, is a gruesome depiction of primal murder in which the attacker, potent and determined, severs his victim into a jumbled mass of body parts...
...The pieces dating to 1942 are sketches that invoke the biomorphic figures of Mirò and Picasso: thin, open ink renderings of imaginary animals and screaming people...
...For some artists, like Helen Frankenthaler, the "stain technique" of applying thinned paint to raw canvas proved a useful beginning...
...There is good reason to be skeptical about Pollock, particularly for someone of my generation, born in the years after he died in 1956...
...Following a trend among powerful galleries, the Gagosian had in this instance set aside its traditional function of art broker to act as a small museum...
...like Ad Reinhardt's minimalist black squares, they come across as unmitigated expressions of the artist's mind...
...his sketches are often awkward and unsure...
...Another possibility is that the gallery, for whatever strange reason, wanted to undermine Pollock's reputation completely...
...Constructing muralsized abstractions composed of the painted line was in a way the essential Abstract Expressionist gesture...
...the chaotic action is treated as a logical balance of elements...
...The commanding artist of Naked Man with Knife is nowhere to be seen...
...All this fanfare ended up stifling Pollock's creativity...
...Paint drips...
...Rather, the working philosophy seems to have been that if a master did it, it must be a masterpiece...
...In the former, Pollock uses umber highlights to bring to life a mass of arches and curves, transforming them into bridges and viaducts, or perhapsawebof arteries...
...more important, he borrowed the animated contours that were his teacher's trademark...
...We can also see him developing techniques that would characterize his later production—using color to convey emotion rather than appearance, and uniformly filling the canvas instead of centering upon a focal point...
...Such reactions should not be dismissed as my-kid-could-do-that Philistinism...
...This works both for and against them...
...One supposes Pollock hoped to invigorate the works by the stark juxtaposition of the black paint and the dirty white of the canvas...
...In this respect the Pollock exhibit this spring at the Gagosian Gallery in New York was a particular disappointment...
...One reason, I think, is that he lost the unselfconsciousness he had...
...In his early canvases, a field of wheat, a farmer's shirt tail and a mountain on the horizon were all depicted with the same undulating line that would dramatically inform his subsequent work...
...There is neither tension nor lyricism here...
...The Black Paintings were unfortunate because they were esthetic failures, and still more because they kept Pollock from answering the questions his drip paintings posed...
...while remaining solidly figurative, they became more violently abstract...
...The suspicion is fueled by the fact that the drip paintings overshadow everything else Pollock did...
...The first part of the show consisted of 17 works on paper covering the years 1933-51...
...Did Pollock merely grab a gimmick and run with it...
...He is held as an American master, of course, and his canonization not only signaled the shift of the art world's center from Paris to New York but also "broke the ice, " as Willem de Kooning put it, for the rest of the Abstract Expressionists...
...Perhaps it was the defensible conviction that there is some worth in seeing a famous artist's failures...
...In the public eye they stand not as mountains but as monoliths, isolated from the rest of art history as well as the rest of Pollock's oeuvre...
...The second part of the show consisted of eight of the "Black Paintings" done in 1951-52...
...With two exceptions— a pleasingly lyrical composition in pastel and gouache, and a 1943 watercolorand-ink interpretation of a primitive mask (a recurring reference for Pollock at the time)—they could be described as half-hearted Rorschach tests...
...By the end of the decade, Pollock's images began to show the influence of Picasso's Cubism...
...One piece is so bad that you don't know whether to laugh or wince...
...That purity appears to have been destroyed by the avalanche of publicity Pollock invited in 1949 when he posed for a Life magazine spread entitled, "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States...
...They are secondrate efforts, and presenting them as something of greater magnitude—in the catalogue essay, Pollock-collector Ben Heller claims they are "major works in their own right"—does a disservice not only to the artist but also to the viewer trying to come to terms with his legacy...
...Along the way, though, his career was marked by artistic breakthroughs...
...Mounting a show spanning Pollock's career is thus a delicate operation...
...Part of the fascination of the drip paintings is their purity...
...Had the Gagosian been exhibiting these works in the hope of making sales, it might be able to plead caveat emptor...
...Only two of the works, Number II, 1951 and Number 6,1952, give evidence of any deliberate construction...
...It offered little enlightenment and much pain...
...Let's look briefly at Pollock's artistic history...
...its delicacy underscores the clumsiness of the other canvases in the room...
...Despite his reliance on the painted une, he was far from being a gifted draftsman...
...The Black Paintings are executed primarily in black enamel on coarse duck canvas...
...The following year he consented to do a painting on a raised glass panel so that a filmmaker could record his actions from beneath...
...On the one hand, paintings like One or Autumn Rhythm are so different from anything done before that the viewer must confront the canvas head on, without the mediation of context or related intellectual issues...
...The sense of horror is heightened by the artist's control of space...
...Never mind that we gain no insight into Pollock from the ploy of putting glorified envelope doodlings in a frame and calling them high art...
...By and large, it was a collection of mistakes, giving the impression that Pollock was merely an inept paint-thrower with good publicity...
...Granted that the drip paintings are certainly sui generis, is the received opinion that they popped into existence in a vacuum accurate...
...Number 6 displays a lithographer's sense of form and shading...
...At the minimum, the art assembled should reflect an underlying vision...
...What could the rationale be for presenting Pollock's dismal works on paper...
...his work appears at the least questionable...
...But the task of examining Pollock's nondrip period is not an easy one, because it includes an extraordinary amount of mediocre stuff...
...Did Pollock exhaust the approach even as he defined it...
...I think it is more the case that they veil Jackson Pollock...
...Yet walking through the exhibit and leafing through the accompanying catalogue, one feels that neither edification nor radical revisionism was intended...
...Pollock may not have been a draftsman, but to display what is trivial to the point of inanity is to do him an injustice...
...but having been thinned first, it produces an entirely different effect...
...Those years, coming on the heels of his productive 1947-50 period, were artistically sterile for Pollock...
...Pollock, too, worked for a time with Regionalist themes, notably agriculture and westward migration...
Vol. 73 • April 1990 • No. 7
