PICTURING JACKSON POLLOCK
GELERNTER, DAVID
PICTURING JACKSON POLLOCK A Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art By David Gelernter Yellow is the cruelest color. Seemingly extroverted and gay, it expects to be treated like a prima donna,...
...In Number 3 (1948), the plot centers on thick ropes of aluminum, writhing like out-of-control firehoses...
...it is the only drip painting that feels complete...
...He would have been lost without his wife, would probably have amounted to nothing...
...The eye can distinguish a million bright reds, greens, and purples, but only a narrow band of clear yellows...
...beneath them, gray-teal and rust-yellow collect in pools and spatters, and brown streams swirl into dirty-orange rivers...
...The barest touch of black or graphite turns it dirty, grudging green...
...You can't forget as you look at this work that the artist died in 1956 at age forty-four, thrown from a heavy car that had jumped the road and was hurtling end-over-end...
...Lavender Mist notwithstanding, every one of his drip paintings has urgent violence somewhere in it...
...two girls were aboard, and one was killed along with him...
...I overheard a lady at the exhibition tell her friend that it was "exquisite...
...There is a question of its being incomplete—^pointing to an artistic destination instead of being one, posing a question and refusing to answer...
...Yet the question is serious...
...Some are altogether new...
...He was a weak and selfish man...
...Instead of confronting his technical limitations, Pollock slipped around and outwitted them...
...In the end, he even figured out how to portray himself using these strange new lines he had invented...
...Blue Poles is probably Pollock's greatest painting...
...And if you juxtapose any one of them with the wrong neighbors, it will shrivel and shriek...
...Several of the late paintings are masterpieces...
...No pop-culture outlet of comparable importance would even consider a move like this today...
...The Deep (1953) is one of Abstract Expressionism's great achievements—histrionic, but Pollock is always histrionic...
...The pink in this painting is a pale peach-gray, nowhere near lavender...
...Yet de Kooning is incomparably the greater painter and will prove more influential in the end...
...There is a lot of dance in Pollock's work...
...Blue Poles, the delayed culmination of the drip series, answers at last...
...In his drunk-driver role, he was not only a suicide but a killer...
...Pollock's friend and fellow-artist Tony Smith drove many hours through a rainstorm to the far end of Long Island to calm the drunken master, who had a knife and was raging...
...Some (such as White Light from 1954) look backward to the wriggling, densely painted networks of the years immediately preceding the Drip Age...
...If Lavender Mist is the background, where is the foreground...
...But this show's catalogue uses instead a photograph of Pollock at work, a still from the famous documentary film by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg...
...also great...
...Inevitably, the viewer reads those reeling, suffering, staggering blue poles as Pollock's self-portrait...
...Looking at Lavender Mist, you wonder whether it is a painting or rather a kind of vamping on can-vas—a prologue that forces attention toward an absent, unavailable climax, an interesting (even mesmerizing) figure that the band plays repeatedly while you wait for the song to start...
...The press release claims that "psychological and medical problems" plagued him—which is simultaneously true and an evasion of the truth...
...Nonetheless, it is exquisite...
...The Pollock retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through February 2, is one of this decade's important shows...
...Nowadays we have chased masculine art into exile, and we laugh at its futility and bumbling earnestness and inarticulate despair...
...Pollock is famous for his drip paintings, which date from 1947 through 1950 with a few encores afterward...
...the whole large painting (roughly seven feet by ten) is full of restless motion, but there is nothing frantic about it: It is all murmurs and whis-pers—the rose arbor alive with hidden bees, turned to silver...
...Tightly structured as it is, and centering on Pollock's rapt and suffering face...
...The painter merely bakes a certain texture and carves out a rectangular piece of it...
...Smith proposed that they make a painting...
...Clement Greenberg, critic and Pollock booster, came up with the name—presumably because the pink plus silver plus traces of blue in the black lines and gray-teal splotches yield a lavender feeling (sort of) when you look from the distance...
...We project onto them the artist's famous, brooding, omnipresent cultural icon of a face—and then they seem complete...
...The non-Pollock contributions (Barnett Newman may have worked on the canvas, too) eventually disappeared beneath the surface of Pollock's last major drip work...
...It reports (predictably) that Pollock was "championed by art critics and mocked by the popular press...
...It is not pretty, but (unlike today's fashionable art) it is not ironic, snide, or patronizing either...
...They emerge thrashing and dripping from the background...
...An all-over painting allegedly has no plot or center of attention...
...Pollock's well-known life story insinuates itself into every corner of the exhibit...
...When the museum's press release calls him "the most influential American painter of the twentieth century," it's doing better...
...These are not psychological problems, they are character flaws...
...But these were lines of a new kind, airborne tangles of paint requiring a new kind of technique...
...The Museum of Modern Art has mounted has mounted a spectacular exhibition...
...This is true, for now...
...Presenting the viewer with an all-over painting is like showing him a Rorschach ink blot and telling him, "This is just an ink blot...
...But the press release makes arguable claims...
...Lavender Mist is arresting and lovely, and poses the key Pollock question...
...Once she was gone, he was through...
...Painting with yellow is like planning a dinner party around a schizophrenic—or around a man like Jackson Pollock, half charmer, half drunken lout...
...Pollock is painting on glass...
...But the painting has a foreground also: eight staggering, drunken slashes, the "blue poles" of the title...
...But the cover photo reminds us of the missing ingredient we sense in nearly all the artist's work—the self-portrait that should have been included, that the artist did not know how to make until nearly the end...
...The catalogue for an ordinary exhibition puts a painting on the cover...
...The cover photo is a commentary on the way we look at these paintings...
...But he did not lose his artistic way...
...There is no question of Lavender Mist's being merely decorative and trivial...
...Where different colors intersect, the result is marbling sometimes, but one color almost never tints or glazes another...
...The drip paintings are conventionally described as "all-over" pictures, but there is no such thing...
...Seemingly extroverted and gay, it expects to be treated like a prima donna, or it will go to pieces...
...It is often compared to Clyfford Still's work...
...But male artists (because they can't help it) still turn the stuff out—on the low-rent cultural fringes, in the spiritual counterparts of the dingy Greenwich Village walk-ups that the Abstract Expressionists inhabited before they struck gold and moved to the suburbs...
...Serious artists are nearly always driven to portray themselves, but Pollock lacked the technique to make convincing portraits in the conventional sense...
...Lavender Mist (1950) is neither lavender nor mist, but is one of the greatest of this series...
...We can't look all over, we can only look at...
...The wreck also summarizes the artist without his wife...
...Very few ever manage to put their desperation into paint...
...As Varnedoe reports in his essay, Life magazine published a story in 1949— "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States...
...Kirk Varnedoe notes in his fine catalogue essay that, in a rare and fragmentary self-portrait in an early notebook, the subject glances furtively to one side...
...One final thing the museum's press release neglects to report is a truth that many viewers will have in mind as they emerge—that Pollock's is above all masculine art, art of physical force, of the painter's will hitting canvas with uncompromising kamikaze power...
...The Deep is vibrant...
...Why did the photograph displace the painting we expected...
...He was a fair-to-lousy draftsman...
...Lacy lines whip around in a tangle of white and black and silver and pink...
...Reminding us that Pollock's is a grim story: His best paintings are tragedies that leave a person shaken...
...Instead of touching a brush to stretched canvas, the artist pours, spatters, flings, and drips paint onto canvas unrolled on his studio floor...
...Also sick...
...The text was partly pro-, partly anti-Pollock...
...When he got back to alcohol, his productivity collapsed...
...We don't understand Abstract Expressionism because we don't understand America's two brilliant postwar decades...
...strobe-frozen electricity arcing a blood-black cosmic waste...
...Pollock inspires these exiled male artists, and hardship is good for them, and some day they will come down from the hills...
...Pollock reaches for yellow repeatedly, but usually—as in the monumental, magnificent B^-ue Poles (1952)—his yellow comes out grim and soiled, subtracting and not adding serenity and brightness, reminding us of corruption...
...There is nothing murmurous or elegant in this picture...
...that made Pollock famous...
...The painting is tense with fright...
...Like de Kooning, like all great artists, Pollock was a mirror of his times...
...Still, too, uses ragged black voids, but his pictures are shallow, labored, and homely...
...but he was mean and unfaithful to her...
...The eye discovers a plot in every painting— aside from the implied dark shadow of Pollock himself...
...Mainly, it is desperate...
...The show confirms that Pollock (with Rothko and de Kooning) is part of the big three of Abstract Expressionism...
...Hordes of men are desperate, after all—to prove something to women, or to say how they feel and what they want, or simply to announce who they are...
...It is a hot, hissing mass of live wires, broken and writhing—vermilion and silver and black, dirty yellow, dirty white...
...But to read it in 1998 is to be astonished at its very existence...
...crazy lines with reckless force, in order to prove something unprov-able to his women and himself...
...She took this as wondrous and remarkable, for her husband was obviously creating not merely paintings but great and revolutionary ones...
...He was always painting backdrops for himself...
...The show also includes some wonderful pre-drip works...
...The huge canvas was the result of a famous nighttime, nightmare visit...
...Pollock's response would have been obscene...
...He was drunk...
...But what is the answer...
...He came to adulthood during the Depression, and his colors tended towards a worn-out, Depression shabbiness all his life...
...But to sweep his weak selfishness under the psychological-problems rug is to re-enact the ancient tradition of whitewashing great men's lives...
...He once asked his wife, referring to one of the drip pictures, "Is this a painting...
...Mist" suggests transparency, but Pollock's color is—here, as nearly always— opaque...
...The question is not whether, as a few hostile critics said at the time, Pollock was a mere fabric designer, or a maker of chic backgrounds for fashion shoots...
...Number 27 (also 1950) is a view through the windshield as you drive through a silver-white-pink-yellow storm of shattering force, a storm to end the world, yet wholly silent, with mysterious pale-gray shapes dancing in the foreground...
...The colors are lovely: pale gray-teal and (as usual) dirty yellow warmed up by gentle orange and vermilion...
...An untitled drawing from 1945 is worth the price of admission: a curvy, blotted-and-squirming Kandinsky line snake dancing in the background, straight-and-nar-row planks laid across the front, mysterious faces lurking in the distance...
...Pollock's own paintings are better, deeper images...
...And we see, through the glass, Pollock's face, brush, and writhing black line—his leitmotiv...
...He was also mocked by art critics and championed by the popular press, but that version fits establishment preconceptions less handily...
...an image of great delicacy and restraint...
...More important, he lacked the character to look himself in the eye...
...The big-boldness of Abstract Expressionism was no protest against, it was a characteristic part of the postwar United States...
...It is too easily corrupted...
...But as a group, they speak also of the giddy expansion of cultural possibilities in America after World War II—of the yawning vacuum that brought forth with a great whoosh all sorts of art and ideas...
...In the meantime, why not visit Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art, where you can see the wave of the past and the wave of the future simultaneously...
...But paintings are not lasagna, and human nature makes all-over paintings impossible...
...This artist whose weakness was poor draftsmanship insisted, nonetheless, on building his masterpieces exclusively out of lines...
...In the celebrated but rarely seen Mural (1943), an abstract, frantic chorus line crowds the picture plane...
...When he started making money at last, he stiffed the brothers who had cared for him during the long, hard years of drunken struggle...
...The big car end-over-ending is a macabre precis of his whole career: His life's work was the tracing of Contributing editor David Gelernter is art critic for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Is it simply a better image than any Pollock painting...
...Pollock had been relentlessly unfaithful to Lee Kras-ner, who had added discipline and purpose just sufficient to make his life cohere...
...During the hugely creative years between 1948 and 1950, Pollock barely drank...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 11
