Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1999/01/20/jackson_pollock_superstar.php
Wednesday, January 20, 1999
'Jackson Pollock,' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, runs through February 2.
How nice it used to be, to discover Jackson Pollock through the Modern's permanent collection, now temporarily disassembled. The collection presented a seamless artistic narrative, Cezanne to Picasso to Pollock, the anxiety, fragmentation, and demolition of pictorial space. It seemed a masterful performance by flawless artists — an epic story. So let's remember Pollock as he appeared in the The Jackson Pollock Room, Permanent Collection. How, in poured and dripped enamel, he proclaimed American artistic hegemony with the subtlety of a B-52. One: Number 31, 1950 (1950), over eight feet high and 17 feet across, spanned the length of the back wall. Number IA, 1948 (1948), slightly smaller, hung to its left. Full Fathom Five (1947) loomed over your shoulder. The She-Wolf (1943), Pasipha≈í (1943), and Gothic (1944), those lesser lights, flanked the chamber like ante-types, if you will, of a holy frieze. The transfiguration of Jackson.
No doubt the Modern meant to imbue its massive Pollock retrospective, which dislocated half of its permanent collection, with similar narrative. But the actual show so ingloriously fails in this regard, to show Pollock as an artistic success, that we are left asking, why? Why does he seem distant and foreign when he was once so contemporary? Why do his accomplishments seem sad and powerless when they were once so vibrant?
Pollock had a problem: he was a great artist but a mediocre painter. He knew from youth that he wanted to be an 'artist,' in the abstract way a child says 'I want to be a doctor,' but he rarely displayed the abilities of a gifted painter. Schooling in the 20s and 30s at the Manual Arts School in California, and at Thomas Hart Benton's Art Students League in New York, produced the throwaway work common among art students (pulled from the dumpsters for this retrospective), but foreshadowed little future success.
His subject matter and composition shifted radically from painting to painting in this early period, and his search for inspiration ranged from Benton's folksy Americana to Mir‚Ǩ's ectoplasmic surrealism to the Left-leaning Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. In the late Summer of 1936, Pollock, Philip Guston, and three other friends even toured Orozco's Epic of American Civilization, less than two years after its completion, in the basement of Dartmouth's Baker Library (imagine running into this crowd in the Reserves).
While Pollock's early paintings varied stylistically, they shared one trait: one critic would say that Jackson battered his way though every facet of 20th-century painting before arriving at his own, signature style. The paint application is consistently heavy. The brush strokes panged with inability.
Walking through the early rooms of this retrospective, everyone is on guard — to find the drips. Pollock's technique of poured and splashed paint freed him from the shackles of a brush. It allowed the true artist to come forward, one who by the late 1940s and early 50s had a keen sense of where art was headed: the expanded dimensions of mural painting, the psychologically-propelled, 'automatic' art of the Surrealists, the disintegration of pictorial space by the Cubists.
Two breakthroughs came in 1943. Pollock's first drips of paint poured forth onto an otherwise brush-painted abstraction (Untitled [Composition with Pouring I], 1943); and his first large-scale canvas, Mural, measuring 7 feet by 19 feet, was executed in a burst of creative energy through one, harried, 24-hour period. (The latter, which was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim for her East 61st street townhouse and later donated to the University of Iowa Museum of Art, has been the greatest find of this retrospective.)
Three years later, in 1947, Pollock began painting in what might be called his high-style: large canvases laid flat, the application of paint poured on, all-over abstraction. This run, marked by a fury of activity and production, spans from Full Fathom Five (1947), to Blue Poles: Number II, 1952 (1952). Within these six years Pollock painted his greatest masterpieces, including Lavender Mist: Number 1 (1950), Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950), Number 32, 1950 (1950), and Convergence: Number 10, 1952 (1952). He also eclipsed his American colleagues, and his European contemporaries, as the most well-known artist of the generation. In fact he became what perhaps no other artist in history had been before, a celebrity in his own time.
Four years later he drove his car into a tree less than a mile from his East Hampton farm and killed himself, along with a sometime-girlfriend in the passenger seat. He had produced little art since 1952. His trim frame had become puffy though a diet of beer, his face jaundiced and stained with cigarette smoke. Something killed him, but it was not the artistic martyrdom that many critics would rush to call it.
Pollock was a great artist and a mediocre painter, but he made an even worse celebrity. He knew he wanted fame, but, like his desire to become an artist, he failed to anticipate its consequences. From an early age he experimented with his persona. In high school in California he grew his hair long and fashioned himself a European socialist agitator. Later, in New York, he abandoned the tweedy suits and pipes for a Stetson and cowboy boots, following his new mentor Thomas Hart Benton. He slowly honed this personal narrative, inventing a Wild-West heritage that was never really there (his family left Cody, Wyoming for California when Jackson was nine months old). But Pollock acted the all-American, the hard drinker, the country boy, the anti-intellectual. Media-ready.
Time called him 'one of America's three best artists' in 1947. Vogue introduced him to its readers in 1948. Life featured his work twice in that same year, only to incense its readers next August with the headline: 'Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?' (Note a pun in the word 'painter.') His drip paintings, so wild and fresh, looked simply indecipherable and crazy in magazine reproduction. Once Hans Namuth shot his famous photographs in 1950, published in Artnews and reproduced everywhere, Pollock's look, the dangling cigarette, the intense gaze, became inseparable from his art.
While Jackson was a willing contributor to his own myth, posing for pictures, entertaining reporters, he also fell into the trappings of fame. He failed to distinguish between his public and private persona. His life began to parallel his art: serious, wild, destructive. Compound the anxieties of fame with an inability to move beyond the drip technique, and a genuinely introverted personality (he hated cocktail parties, that talisman of the art world). You can almost see that tree crashing through his windshield on Fireplace Road.
Pollock's breakup matched the crackup of his AbEx contemporaries: Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky both would both take their own lives. It also spelled the end of Abstract Expressionism's earnest, ultra-personal exposition of the human psyche. Maybe the end of personal art entirely. As celebrity culture became the all-eclipsing American art form in the last five decades, avant-garde art took on more public topics (politics, commerce, itself) and mollified them with irony. Nothing would be taken too seriously again. Minimalist art had the passion of an auto-body shop. Pop art made Campbell's soup and Brillo celebrities. Perhaps it was Warhol who answered the questions Pollock posed, namely, how to be an artist and be famous at the same time.
If there is any doubt that Pop is supreme at century's end, just walk through the more interactive (and crowded) areas of the Pollock show. The Modern has created a walk-in mock-up of Pollock's farmhouse studio in one room. You can touch swatches of dripped canvas reproduced by the curatorial staff in another. Your kids can attend afternoon classes on the fun and mischief-making of Pollock's drip technique (wear old shoes, smocks provided). And you can take a piece of Pollock home. Outside the final room of the exhibition, the Modern has set up a register for patrons to purchase Pollock posters, post-cards, books, and even a Pollock CD (of his favorite jazz music).
Soon we will lick the back of a Jackson Pollock stamp, just approved by the USPS, adapted from one of Namuth's pictures (Jackson's dangling cigarette has been air-brushed out). In a year or so we will buy tickets to see Jackson Pollock the movie, which the actor Ed Harris is currently directing and filming, casting himself in the title role. Everyone, it seems, is profiting from Jackson Pollock — except, well, Jackson Pollock. Even his paintings became valuable only in the years after his death.
So, what if he had been less serious, more ironic? He could have painted drip painting for decades after Autumn Rhythm, with titles like Drip Painting for Philip Johnson (1964), or Poured Painting for Brooke Astor, 1979 (1979), and amassed a small fortune. But then, I guess, he wouldn't have been Jackson Pollock. He would have been simply more like us.