Splat, Spackle, Plop!
(posted Saturday, Oct.
31, 1998)
The first
powerful experience I remember having while looking at art was in the Jackson
Pollock room at the Museum of Modern Art. I was 13 or so, and we were on a
family visit to New York. Overwhelming everything else in the museum was the 17
foot long One: Number 31, 1950 , a painting that amazed and thrilled me
with its scale, its spontaneity, and the intensity it radiated. I had the same
feeling again when I saw Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 at the National Gallery in
Washington soon thereafter.
But Pollock has left me cold
as an adult, and often bored. His paintings looked hollow and often sloppy and
garish. Did I respond to him as an adolescent because Pollock was a misbehaved,
grandiose adolescent himself? Maybe we all just had a teen crush on Pollock the
art world delinquent. Or was it entombment in museums, being surrounded by the
work of nonaction painters, that muffled his force and left him dead on the
wall? I have been awaiting a show that would settle the issue.
The Pollock retrospective
that opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City this weekend ought to
resolve all such ambivalence. With more than 200 works--pretty much every
important painting Pollock did--it is a complete and authoritative presentation
of his life and work. Occupying the entire third floor of the museum, it
includes both a full-scale replica of Pollock's studio in the Springs, on Long
Island, and a continuous showing of the fascinating films that Hans Namuth, a
German émigré photographer, made of Pollock painting at the peak of his career.
The long catalog essay by the Modern's chief curator, Kirk Varnedoe, is a model
of its kind, covering the salient facts of Pollock's biography, artistic
development, and the critical debate about him. As an exhibition, this is one
of the best I have ever seen. And it did make up my mind.
In the early rooms,
skepticism can't but prevail. From the time Pollock arrived in New York, in
1930, at the age of 18, until about 1946, he was casting about for a style. He
loved the idea of being an artist, but his vast ambition wasn't coupled with
much, or even any, talent. Through the first four rooms, we see him find and
mimic mentors, some living, some dead. He first fell under the sway of Thomas
Hart Benton, his teacher at the New York Art Students' League, and Albert
Pinkham Ryder, essaying moonlight seascapes and moody swirls of Americana, such
as Going West (1934-38). Then Pollock apprenticed himself to the
Mexican muralists, Siqueiros and Orozco, as in Untitled
(Naked Man With Knife) (1938-41). Next he ate Picasso's dust, as in
Stenographic Figure (1942), then Miró's, as in Untitled (Blue [Moby Dick]) (1943).
By 1945, when the ungifted
Pollock was still struggling with the greats, the critic Clement Greenberg was
already heralding him as the baby Jesus of American art, noting that "he is not
afraid to look ugly." Greenberg liked Pollock because of the evidence he
provided for Greenberg's Marxian view of art history as a series of developing
stages in which the picture plane was destined to flatten, empty, and
disappear. Today Greenberg is much derided for his dogmatic views and imperial
pronouncements. But as far as I can tell, he was correct in every respect:
right that Pollock was ugly, right about where American Modernism was going,
and right that Pollock had genius trapped inside him. What is amazing is that
Greenberg could see how good Pollock would become, given how bad he was.
Perhaps the most famous picture from that period is (1943). After 13 years of
practice, Pollock was void in color sense, draftsmanship, composition, and
handling of his materials. The painting is a kind of red herring. With its
suggestive title, glyphs, and symbols, it is designed to make you think it
contains more than meets the eye.
But in 1946 something
suddenly happened: Pollock's nauseous swirls and lugubrious slatherings stepped
into a phone booth and re-emerged as his mature "all-over" style. You see this
first in three paintings known as the "Sounds in the Grass" series, the best of
which is Shimmering Substance. Pollock has said goodbye to content and
seems to have found his self-confidence at last. A year later, he is flicking,
dripping, pouring, and splattering, creating medium-scale works of great beauty
(though still interspersed with fits of unappealing blotchiness). You don't
have to read the elaborate taxonomy of his technique in the catalog to
recognize that what sometimes appears as chaos is in fact the product of great
control and finesse. Pollock came at the canvas with a range of tools--sticks,
brushes, basters, and paint cans with holes--the effects of which he had
mastered. There is chance in his paintings, but it occurs within a well-defined
structure.
How did Pollock arrive so
suddenly? I think what happened is that he threw off the heavy influence of
others and stopped worrying about his lack of conventional technique. Instead,
he began to express himself in the way he could, basing his craft on his
abilities. The year 1947 yields a bounty of expressive work such as the
gorgeous , which has the quality of a musical nocturne, its orange, yellow,
black, and white filigrees spun on a thin surface of silver and unprimed
canvas. In Full Fathom Five, the murk grows more evocative; the
enticing detail is a kind of small crossbow shape, in yellow and orange,
glimpsed through the submarine tangle of a surface encrusted with nails,
buttons, coins, and cigarette butts. In these paintings the feelings--mirth,
ecstasy, confusion, awe, whatever--seem intense and distinct.
It stays that way over the
next few years as Pollock's scale expands toward the vast masterworks of 1950.
The three greatest of his monumental canvases, hung together in a single room,
have an almost overwhelming presence. Curiously, these paintings don't repay
prolonged viewing--or at least they didn't for me. One follows the arcs and
arabesques across the canvas, but they don't lead the eye anywhere. When you
try not to follow lines, you find you can't get any purchase on the whole. This
is the opposite of the experience you have looking at a Mark Rothko. You soak
in a Rothko as in a warm tub. It's a meditative, spiritual experience. Pollock,
by comparison, is a splash of cold water on the face. The power lies in being
confronted by his paintings, not in looking for meaning in them.
For some reason, I wasn't
much moved by the old One: Number 31, 1950 . But , a 15 foot long
monochrome work on loan from Düsseldorf, Germany, took my breath away. This is
the distilled essence of Pollock's genius, a mysterious calligraphy stripped of
the distraction of color or the accretion of layers of paint. In the
extraordinary photographs and films Namuth made of Pollock working in 1950, you
can be mesmerized by his act of creation. The agonized expression on his face
looks like a kind of rapture. His dance around the canvas looks like its own
hidden language.
What follows the incredible
spree of productivity that lasted from 1947-50 is a kind of brownout. In the
final two rooms of the exhibition, you see Pollock, who was suffering from
depression and had relapsed into alcoholism, struggling to regain a gift that
had vanished as swiftly as it had arrived. By 40, he was pretty much washed up.
His career took the shape of a palindrome. looks like Untitled (1946).
Easter and the Totem(1953) collapses back to Totem
Lesson 1 (1944). Here Pollock's "camouflage palette," as Varnedoe notes,
"gives way to carnival." The only really arresting work he did after 1950 is .
With its electric brightness, this huge painting, which Pollock's friends
started for him, is stunning but sad, a big smile for the camera and perhaps a
kind of requiem for his earlier work. In his final painting, Search
(1955), Pollock seems to have drifted back even further, to the period before
his talent began to emerge. In his final year he binged, painted nothing, and
drove his car into a tree.
You can explain this flameout
with whatever theory appeals to you. In clinical terms, Pollock had a
productive manic phase, and he was overtaken by black dog in the days before
anti-depressants. In art historical terms, he flattened the picture plane,
emptied it, and then had nowhere to go. You can view him as the classic case of
the doomed artist, his genius and self-destruction bound up together. My own
admittedly romantic preference is to see his career as a quest for inspiration,
and to say Pollock sought it long, found it briefly, and couldn't live without
it.
