Yeah, but is it Art Eddie?
Jackson Pollock
“Pollock’s talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills itself out in a mineral prodigality not yet crystallized. It is lavish, explosive, untidy. But young painters, particularly Americans, tend to be too careful of opinion. Too often the dish is allowed to chill in the serving. What we need is more young men who paint from inner impulsion without an ear to what the critic or spectator may feel–painters who will risk spoiling a canvas to say something in their own way. Pollock is one.” — James Johnson Sweeney
In an Episode of the now iconic Absolutely Fabulous, after the passing of her father, Edina Monsoon is forced to confront her own mortality; like a Christian Lacroix clad Peggy Guggenheim, she starts feverishly collecting art so as to ensure her name will live on after death. Whilst guiding a bemused Patsy Stone through her newly acquired collection she comes to a sudden stop, “This is a … sort of … corps … in an open, oaken, oblong coffin … with a silk lining … It’s a dead body, Pats.” “Yeah, but is it art, Eddie?” “No, sweetie, it’s my father.” “Are you sure?” “I think so. I’ve never seen him in a suit before.” And therein lies the rub: despite a general willingness of the public to critique and lambaste modern art, there is in actuality very little understanding of the subject matter itself. Perhaps of all great twentieth century artists, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), known for his multi-coloured “action paintings”, those extraordinary, explosive pictures that transformed the idea of modern art, has been most mistreated by critics and misunderstood by the public. His work, which has dominated attitudes towards Abstract Expressionism, is often dismissed with the locution, “My kid could have done that”. By the time he died, drunk, in a car crash in 1956, Pollock was widely recognized as one of the most important figures in the art world, and one of the innovators of the avant-garde styles that were beginning to emerge: he and the Abstract Expressionists were the heirs to Picasso and the School of Paris.
From the perspective of his supporters he was the one, along with Mark Rothko (1903-1970), who liberated painting from the need to represent the physical world. To his detractors, he was a bipolar savant, a “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” figure who was at best technologically innovative, and at worst a “celebrity” (the new term for charlatan) who duped gullible collectors with his so called “drip paintings”. They are not galled by the pictures themselves, but the claim that they are art. (Of course there are some who wonder if his art — like that of Ornette Coleman (1930-2015) in the late 1950s — was an outright piss-take). What has remained constant in all of these views is the image of Pollock as not only a troubled artist, his work the bi-product of paroxysms of anger and frustration, but a deliberate, thoughtful stylist, knowledgeable about the modern European formal tradition and the painter of his own autobiography. Every part of a painting by Pollock is equal to every other part of the same painting. There is no narrative or focal point to observe, he dripped paint onto flat canvases as a spontaneous expression of his psyche and its fit or lack thereof into the everyday world. “The experience Pollock himself has had with this high kind of feeling is what gives quality to his work,” explained the painter Robert Goodnough. “Of course anyone can pour paint on a canvas, as anyone can bang on a piano, but to create one must purify the emotions; few have the strength, will or even the need, to do this.”
Jackson Pollock at work, Photograph by Hans Namuth © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate
Jackson Pollock at work, Photograph by Hans Namuth © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate
In the 1950s there was no sure proof of the existence of an “avant-garde” and for an artist to depart even moderately from the norm, was to take their life in their own hands; in 1967, the American poet and critic John Ashbery wrote, “A painter like Pollock was gambling on the fact that he was the greatest painter in America, for if he wasn’t he was nothing, and the drips would turn out to be random splashes from the brush of a careless house-painter. It must have occurred to Pollock that there was just a possibility that he wasn’t an artist at all, that he had spent his life ‘toiling up the wrong road to art’ as Flaubert said of Zola”. Pollock’s greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from colour, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space. The famous “drip paintings” he began to produce in the late 1940s represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century; the controversy surrounding them, both during his lifetime and today, revolves largely around a lack of knowledge concerning his artistic background and how he arrived at a new mode of working. Pollock was taught by the Synchromist and American Social Realist painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) at the Art Students League in New York. Although Benton had experimented with Modernist techniques and modes, his style became increasingly narrative (depicting the small farmer or members of the working class who felt abandoned following the Industrial Revolution), and by the 1930s he was vocal in attacking the French avant-garde movement, describing modern art as “good for nothing but to release neurotic tensions”. Pollock was a teenager, struggling with his inner demons of alcohol and depression; in an attempt to resolve conflicts arising from his childhood and his mother, he used Benton’s compositional principles to begin radical experiments in complex abstract form, combining historical, aesthetic and psychological influences. Pollock credited Benton not just for his teaching, which “drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting,” but also for helping him to stay alive.
Jackson Pollock at work, Photograph by Hans Namuth © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate
Pollock immersed himself in the in the indigenous art of Oceanic, African and Native American peoples, and became increasingly drawn to “non-traditional” artists such as the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). Siqueiros used unusual methods — applying paint by “pouring, dripping, splattering and hurling it at the surface” — an obvious influence on Pollock’s signature work. By the late 1930s, increasingly interested in surrealism, and the psychological theories of Carl Jung (1875-1961), Pollock made a deliberate and clean break from Benton’s Regionalism, producing numerous pictographic drawings based on striking symbolic motifs (Although Benton dismissed Pollock’s “paint-spilling innovations” as “absurdities”, and Pollock disparaged the work of Benton by saying “he had come face-to-face with Michelangelo and lost”, the two would remain close friends, converting a chicken coop at Benton’s Massachusetts beach house into a studio known as “Jack’s Shack”, where, as an impoverished young artist, Pollock spent his summers, swimming, gardening and chopping firewood.)
Though Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Joan Miró (1893-1983), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and Paul Klee (1879-1940), would play important roles in Pollock’s development, it is through Picasso (1881-1973) that he began to find is his own voice as an artist. His impact can perhaps most strongly be seen in works such as Number 14 (1951) in which the viewer is presented with a Jungian dreamscape; within Pollock’s curling and coiling lines can be seen two monstrous writhing figures that bring to mind Picasso’s Guernica (1937), whilst Number 7 (1952) offers a broad face, lopsided breasts and sturdy legs. Simultaneously, these works are a tribute and challenge to Picasso. Speaking to B. H. Friedman in 1969, Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner (1908-1984) said, “there’s no question that he admired Picasso and at the same time competed with him, wanted to go past him … I remember one time I heard something fall and then Jackson yelling, ‘God damn it, that guy missed nothing!’ I went to see what had happened. Jackson was sitting, staring; and on the floor, where he had thrown it, was a book of Picasso’s work.” It’s unclear exactly how, against the provincial background of America, the figurative “American scene” and the symbolic and narrative images of the thirties and forties, Pollock made the final leap from these influences to developing a technique that ushered in the age of Abstract Expressionism; but it would be wrong to suggest that he arrived upon his signature style in a bubble.
The arrival in New York of the exiled Surrealists (as well as Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)) during the Second World War, who brought with them both a first-hand experience of European art as well as a means for freeing the Americans from dependence on their own irreverent attitudes, had an enormous impact on the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, including Pollock, many of whom adopted their ideas and techniques, including an interest in Jungian theory and automatic drawing. At the same time, Pollock read, and was immediately struck by, the theories of Russian emigree painter John D. Graham (1886-1961). In his influential essay, Primitive art and Picasso, Graham explored the potent connection between indigenous art and modern abstraction in terms of the Jungian collective unconscious. With the fact of exile came the idea of Europe’s being rendered ineffectual, and the sense of a transference of energy from Europe to America; an atmosphere was created in which (as David Elliott wrote in the Introduction to the Oxford Museum of Modern Art edition of Jackson Pollock - Drawing into Painting) “Life could only be continued in an attempt to re-find the consequences of one’s own actions.” I this context Guernica became the key work for Pollock in that it was a painting of the most passionate political protest, couched in universal, humanistic, and mythic terms, and was, at the same time, an advanced painting plastically. (On one occasion, overhearing a fellow artists speak disparagingly of the painting to a fellow artist, Pollock invited him to “step outside and fight it out”.)
Jackson Pollock at work, Photograph by Hans Namuth © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate
By the mid-1940s, Pollock introduced his famous “drip and splash” paintings, which transformed not only art itself, but the American role in art. Through the intercession of Surrealism, Freud, and Jung, the individual psyche became a means for making art. A curious mixture of the abstract and the symbolic, almost wholly individual, Pollock’s drip works were an exercise of the unconscious, and had a direct relation to the artist’s emotions, expression, and mood. The drip technique was something that was already around; Max Ernst (1891-1976) had used it in 1942, as well as Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), whose first drip paintings may have post-dated Pollock's. In 1947 Pollock explained that, “When I am painting I am not much aware of what is taking place, it is only after that I see what I have done.” In August 1949, alternately mocking and respectful, Life magazine ran a feature story posing the question: “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”
In 1951, at the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned his signature style of multi-coloured “drip paintings” and created a series of fifty or so monumental works, referred to as his “Black pourings”. He was sick of being pigeonholed — he wanted to try something new, to find a middle ground between abstraction and figuration. According to Krazner, Pollock’s method alternated between sticks and a turkey baster, which he used like giant fountain pens to apply black enamel paint to unstretched, unprimed canvas; this creates the impression of dark and controlled disintegration, thus contradicting the mythic “Jack the Dripper” image. When 32 of these large-scale poured paintings were exhibited floor to ceiling at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1951 (Pollock’s fourth solo show), it was a critical and financial disaster; no one wanted them, they were too large (who has eighteen-foot walls?”), too advanced and in that conservative political climate, too provocative. Artist and patron Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990), a close friend of Pollock, purchased Lavender Mist, but it was the only work in the show to sell. “For me it was heartbreaking,” Parsons recalled, “those big paintings at a mere $1,200. For Jackson it was ghastly; here was beauty, but instead of admiration it brought contempt.” Pollock was making monochromatic paintings before any other artist in America, but for his audience, it was a case of too much too soon.
Pollock is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s most polarizing figures; the narrative surrounding him a mixture of mythologies, truths and half-truths. The critic and curator David Elliott, in his essay Myths, (Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting (1979), notes “Pollock’s mercurial career and early death in a car crash at the age of 44 are wholly in keeping with this pattern; his life and death as well as his work have both been absorbed into our cultural history.” Looking at Pollock’s works in a vacuum, it’s easy to dismiss them as just paint splatters; he’s been categorized as both the “artiste maudit” and “typically American”. Still there’s the prevailing idea that Pollock was a naïve “man-child” of an artist, haphazardly hurling paint at a canvas; in the 2000 movie biopic, his signature “drip technique” is shown as an accident, but this is a misconception. His oeuvre suggests it was an experimental trajectory, or, “controlled accident.” Pollock first experimented with liquid paint in the 1930s and it wasn’t until the following decade that he had mastered the technique of pouring, flinging and spattering liquid paint, and could control its flow to achieve the effect he desired. Pollock modestly put this painstakingly accomplished method down to “… a natural growth out of a need”, explaining that: “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.” Of course, for many, when they look at Pollock’s work, any enjoyment is accompanied by the nagging voice at the back of their minds, asking, “Yeah, but is it art?” Perhaps the philistines are right, and Pollock wasn’t a real artist. Those of us who are willing to accept Pollock’s work as art share his conviction, and to those who might say, “My kid could have done that”, we reply “Maybe, but he couldn’t have meant it”.
Ben Weaver