Happy Birthday, Jackson Pollock. The most controversial artist of the 20th century was born one hundred years ago on January 28 in Cody, Wyoming.
Pollock remains a polarizing figure in art and culture, for all the right reasons.
He is roundly derided on each plateau of society for his poured allover paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s. From Joe Six-Pack claiming that his third grade daughter could do just as good to post-modern scholars deriding the assertion that the arts can contain a singular heroic act, many can meet and agree that Pollock is overrated while sharing no other cultural attitudes in common. Feminists scold the complex relationship he maintained with his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, and the entire Pop Art and Pop Surrealist movements seem predicated simply to stand in opposition to what Jackson Pollock created. The acquisition of his pictures with public funds by museums has ended many a political career over the past 50+ years.
If you can measure a man by his enemies, Pollock makes Picasso and Warhol look like lovingly muddied mediocrities. Years ago I wanted to get one of Pollock's artworks as a tattoo. In searching over his catalog raisone I could find no image that was adequately recognizable when reproduced as an illustration in ink. This is quite an accomplishment for any artist, especially one whose work before and after his poured paintings emphasized the same literal black line that is the formal basis of traditional and modern tattooing. I had to settle for a rendition of the famous Hans Namuth picture of the artist stretched out over his canvas, the bucket of paint in one hand pulled back as the arm stretched forward with a primitive stick coated in chroma.
The tattooist, Mike Horton, asked me at the time if there should be spattered paint under the drawing of Pollock or perhaps flinging off the stick into space. No, I insisted. I had come to understand all too well that the power of Jackson Pollock as a symbol had far outpaced the majesty of his glorious pictures, be they the infamous allovers, the 1940s expressionistic masterpieces or the searching late work's fertile search for a reacquaintance with form.
And so, 16 years after getting that ink, I still goad people into the conversation of who their favorite artist is. So few ever give a definitive response. Art world denizens hem and haw and meander as if reciting their recollection of last year's ArtForum cover children. LowBrow etiquette demands a nod to the outlaw roots of the movement and an inevitable capitulation to the most dexterous realist to grace the inside of last month's issue of Hi-Fructose. Street art fanatics get quite "undergrad thesis" these days about the origins of Blek Le Rat and tagger names that exist only in legend. Philistines insist that media is art and the astute ones rightly choose Matt Groening over Spielberg as the greatest living artist. Sanctimonious stiffs insist there hasn't been a great artist since Raphael. Nobody ever says Thomas Kinkade, the squarest of souls having long got the memo that the painter of light is dreadful. When they return the question, I just pull up my sleeve; if you gotta ask, as they say, you'll never know.
Happy Birthday, Jackson Pollock, you did more in your 44 years on earth and the 56 since than almost any artist: you made people think and talk about art without ever involving yourself in conceptual art.
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I'd love to understand why you and others glorify artists without skill in art. To each his/her own. If you like his work, that's your prerogative.
and falling leaves does not work for me. You are dreadful and so is drip art.
"Modern art is painted by con men for fools" Pablo Picasso
I have found that art critics who try to put down romantic realists and plein air impressionist artists
like Thomas Kinkade usually have a problem with God. You are in our prayers.
Thomas will remain the most popular artist in the World despite the Huffington posts attempts
to put down an American Master artist they don't even take two minutes to check out.
God bless you and Huffington, Bionicman
an American master like Thomas Kinkade. www.thomaskinkade.com
Who is fooling you? Do you accept Christianity? We are the majority. You are
always going to lose when you are against God.
Check out the plein air and french impressionism for two minutes. God bless!
My whole view of Art change when I experienced Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) at the Met in New York in the fall of 1972. - TK
If 'Lavender Mist' and the rest were made during a period of sobriety it’s like he was on an island looking at the chaos of the rest of his life. The miasma must have seemed terrifying, but sinking back into it, and loosing the unjustifiable fame, was ultimately inevitable. I could instruct kids to paint like Pollack or Van Gogh now, but I couldn’t have gotten them to do it at gunpoint before the artists’ breakthroughs, and their parents would have had me thrown in jail for trying.
It is easy to look at ‘No. 5, 1948’ or ‘Starry Night’ but these were blood on the forehead matters of life and death for the artists. They were hard to live with or ignore in real life; “He’d piss in your fireplace” as Joni Mitchell said in Turbulent Indigo.
I made a pilgrimage to Texas to see the Rothko chapel, which was well worth the time and effort. I’d do well to spend some time this year seeking out more Pollack experiences. Thanks, again, for the great article.
I also think we tend to ignore the CoBrA influences of the period, and then of course, there's Janet Sobol, with her all-over poured surfaces, none of which takes away from the sheer visual impact Pollock brings to the fore.
I don't mean to belittle Pollock's, Malevich's, etc. experiments. But I wonder if their poured paintings and black squares and red squares are known so well purely because of their intrinsic visual qualities. You have to explain why it's good, or else it doesn't really work. So I bet there will be an artist who will successfully explore empty space as an object. All that's needed is an good explanation, better than for things that are something. As in, he will be universally known and discussed and admired for that. Go ahead, dismiss this as a joke. It's only obviously certain to happen.
Mat, this is a nice article you have written. It is clear and to the point -- an apparent result of an unequivocal appreciation of Pollock.
A couple of things you wrote that stand out to me: 1) "Pollock remains a polarizing figure in art and culture, for all the right reasons", and 2) "[Pollock] did more in [his] 44 years on earth and the 56 since than almost any artist".
Pollock's impact on art and painting is enormous, and therefore is polarizing.
First, there's his monumental acheivement of breaking over 500 hundred years of tradition by taking painting off the easel. Pollock fulfills Picasso's mission, demonstrated by Cubism, of understanding perceptual dynamics of the canvas beyond perspective-based seeing. Pollock's guess that painting could be expanded, by moving away from the model in place since the Renaissance and earlier, was entirely correct. Pollock's formulation changed the nature of painting and art. Monet and the master Picasso, two obvious predecessors of the concerns that Pollock was involved with, did not fully conceive the solution that Pollock crafted.
Secondly, Pollock fulfills the goal of Surrealism as laid out by Breton. While many only see Pollock's drips and scribbles in terms of the traditional role of painter as reproducer of nature in terms of tromphe d'oeil technique, Pollock reproduces nature in an entirely new way. He is deeply informed by Surrealism. In Pollock's own words, "I AM nature."
The two main undercurrents and concerns of art of 20th Century, Cubism and Surrealism, are brought together tentatively in Pollock's great pre-drip work, and securely in the large canvases of the drip period. This is the turning point -- at the mid-point of the 20th Century -- away from the traditions of Europe. It is what makes Pollock's work vastly, if not entirely, change the way how art is made and understood. Pollock's model was adopted widely; it firmly endures to this day.
As for Pollock's work, particularly the drip paintings, while I do enjoy them I find they have become quite the symbol of middle class values. They lend themselves to the habit of desiring liberty (freedom from restraint) while not exercising freedom (the ability to act), and the responsibility that entails. So as an art form it leads to endless partisan discussion (in which nothing is really risked) without leading anywhere with respect to generating new art, which might actually confront and challenge problematic social perceptions (and hence risk one's standing).
http://www.aaa.si.edu/exhibitions/memories-arrested
Note the next to last picture, a copy of the gallery registrar by an unhappy patron of the arts repulsed at Pollock's solo show.