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NARRATOR: In 1947,
Jackson Pollock
started dripping,
flinging, scattering,
and pouring paint onto canvases
spread across the floor.
Some thought it was lunacy,
but the most influential voices
thought it genius.
That's the legacy
that has prevailed.
That's why you've heard of him
and see his work in museums.
That's why a single
one of his paintings
can sell for $50 million.
But when you find yourself in
front of one of his paintings
now, what do you do with it?
How do you look at this and
derive some sort of something
from it?
Why does it matter?
And what does it mean now?
This is the case
for Jackson Pollock.
Paul Jackson Pollock was born
in 1912 in Cody, Wyoming,
moved around the
southwest with his family,
attended high school
in Los Angeles,
and landed in New York in
1930 to pursue art encouraged
by his older brother Charles.
Pollock studied at the
Art Students League
under American regionalist,
Thomas Hart Benton,
whose representational style he
would go on to react against.
But his rhythmic
structure and contrast
of light and dark, the
young artist internalized.
His eyes were trained
on the usual suspects
of European modernism,
including, of course, Picasso,
who Pollock once cursed,
saying, "That bastard,
he misses nothing!"
He looked to the Mexican
muralists, like Jose Clemente
Orozco and also David
Alfaro Siqueiros
whose experimental workshop
Pollock joined in 1936.
Siqueiros believed
the paintbrush
to be an implement of hair
and wood in an age of steel
and that revolutionary
art required
new materials like
automobile lacquer
and paint thinner and innovative
techniques like airbrushing,
stenciling, flinging paint,
and controlled accidents.
Pollock incorporated some of
these lessons at that time
but drew from many sources.
His southwestern childhood
had sparked his interest
in Native American art.
He visited MoMA's 1941 show,
Indian Art of United States,
several times attending a
demo of Navajo painting made
by dropping colored
sand on the ground.
In the early '40s, Pollock
was making paintings
with imagery derived
from mythology
and from his knowledge
of Jungian analysis.
The surrealist interest
in the unconscious
attracted him as well.
And he was certainly
familiar with their embrace
of automatism or yielding
control of the making process
to let the unconscious
mind hold sway.
So it wasn't like Pollock's drip
paintings came out of nowhere.
Others were doing it too.
Arshile Gorky dripped in 1944.
Hans Hoffman did
around the same time.
And Pollock was trying it
out in his paintings as well.
But his first big
break came in 1942
with this kind of work,
which was selected for a show
at Peggy Guggenheim's
gallery, Art of this Century,
having been judged by the
likes of Piet Mondrian who,
having fled Europe
during World War II,
claimed this was the most
interesting work he'd
seen in America so far.
Pollock's first solo show
garnered much attention.
His pictures
described as archaic,
tribal, and of elemental power.
Curator James Johnson
Sweeney described his talent
as volcanic.
It has fire.
It is unpredictable.
It is undisciplined.
What we need is more young men
who paint from inner impulsion.
Guggenheim also
commissioned this new talent
to create a mural for
her New York townhouse.
And he produced an epic
19-foot long canvas
that cemented his
rising star status
and gave a glimpse
of the rhythmic forms
and loose brushwork
that would follow.
Pollock's other 1942 break was
meeting painter Lee Krasner.
They married in '45 and moved
out to Long Island near East
Hampton where they
set up studios--
hers in the house
and his in the barn.
Pollock continued to
begin his paintings
with totemic and
mythological subjects
but painted over
them with layers
so thick that the original forms
were mostly indistinguishable.
By '47, Pollock was spreading
his canvases on the floor.
Sometimes his initial
layer involved brushwork,
but successive layers
were built up with poured,
dripped, and scattered paint,
artist oils, enamel house
paint, and aluminum
radiator paint.
He used sticks, trowels,
and palette knives.
Sometimes string, sand,
or nails entered the mix.
Narrative content
began to disappear
until all that was
visible was the splatters
and skeins of paint
we all now think
of when we think of Pollock.
The titles dropped away
too, and he began to number
his paintings like
musical compositions.
There was no
sketching in advance,
but it wasn't just paint
flung willy nilly, at least
most of the time.
To a considerable
degree, he controlled
his flow of paint and
distribution of color.
He knew what kinds of motions
and what tools and paints
produce certain results.
He decided what to cover over
and what to let show through.
His all-over compositions betray
a keen awareness of the edges.
And after jags of activity,
he would stop and take
stock of what he'd done before
entering back in or deciding
the work was resolved.
Pollock once responded
to a critic's remarks
by telegramming Time
magazine saying simply,
"No chaos damn it."
This new work did
have its critics.
It was described as
a child's contour
map of the Battle of Gettysburg
and a mop of tangled hair.
Then and now, people
likened his dripping
to bodily spillage--
vomit, pee, ejaculate.
But there were
many who championed
this radical departure,
notably the Museum of Modern
Art and art critic,
Clement Greenberg, who
believed Pollock's
drip paintings to be
the culmination of
the advancement of art
since the dawn of modernism,
charting "the dissolution
of the pictorial into sheer
texture into apparently
sheer sensation."
Pollock became a
larger-than-life figure
thanks to media attention
and the revelatory images
made by photographer Hans Namuth
of Pollock painting in 1950.
Namath also made a short film
of Pollock at work outdoors
and gave us the unforgettable
view from below of Pollock
painting on glass.
Art critic, Harold
Rosenberg, called this kind
of work action painting.
As Pollock was among
a number of artists
at the time for whom the
canvas could be considered
"an arena" in which to act,
the term abstract expressionism
began to be used to describe
the work of these artists who
pursued abstraction as a
means to convey emotion,
each with their own distinctive
gesture and approach.
World War II had been hell,
and for Pollock and his ilk,
still lifes and portraits
were now insufficient.
Echoing Siqueiros,
Pollock explained
new needs need new techniques.
Today, painters do not
have to go to a subject
matter outside themselves.
They work from a
different source.
They work from within.
He had a productive
pocket of years
and would return
to representation
with a series of
paintings from '51 and '52
made with black enamel
and a turkey baster,
oscillating between
abstraction and figuration.
But in his last years, he
made work only sporadically,
struggling with the
alcoholism that plagued him
throughout his life.
Pollock was at the wheel when he
died in a car accident in 1956
at the age of 44, throwing
his mistress from the car
and killing her friend.
Then and now, Pollock's
brief but brilliant career
was emblematic of the post-war
American boom, a country
no longer culturally
subservient to Europe
but defining its own terms.
Pollock symbolized American
fearlessness and freedom,
so much so that his work
and that of his peers
was promoted during
the Cold War as proof
of what was possible
in a democracy--
no matter that Pollock had
been a member of the Communist
Party.
There's a tendency to think
of Pollock's breakthrough
as cutting the 20th
century into halves--
a before and an after.
In 1958, artist
Allan Kaprow wrote,
"He created some
magnificent paintings,
but he also destroyed painting."
Of course, he didn't
destroy painting.
He destroyed some sense a
painting as a grand progression
of movements from this to that.
The medium has persisted,
finding other innovations
and other audiences.
Kaprow saw Pollock's legacy
as pointing the way forward
from painting to
everything else,
leaving us "at the point where
we must become preoccupied
with and even dazzled
by the space and objects
of our everyday life."
As Pollock reacted
against Benton,
many artists reacted against
Pollock, against gesture,
against expression.
As quickly as it appeared,
Pollock's signature mark making
became clicheed, representing
an era in American history
when the art was
macho and large.
The art world was
insular and small.
And the reputed artists were
almost all-male and white.
But where does this
leave us today?
When looking at
his work, Pollock
recommended we "not look
for but look passively
and try to receive
what the painting has
to offer and not bring a
subject matter or preconceived
idea to it."
Of course, no one comes to
art or to anything this way.
But perhaps you might
appreciate the work he suggested
"just as music is enjoyed.
After a while, you may
like it or you may not."
Ornette Coleman likened his
own improvisational jazz
to Pollock's work and
said, "It's not random.
He knows what he's doing.
He knows when he's finished,
but still it's free form."
What happens in
the artist studio
is almost always a mystery--
training and expertise
and persistence
synthesized over time
into a picture or a thing.
But Pollock shows what happened
to get us here more distinctly
than anyone had before.
It's clear that a person was
here and traversed this canvas.
And now he's not.
Paint that was once liquid and
flowing now hardened and frozen
in time.
Pollock called it energy
and motion made visible
and memories arrested in space.
While the largeness of
his persona has faded,
Pollock certainly isn't
absent when you with the work.
It's fun and almost irresistible
to imagine being Pollock.
There are lots of
things you can think
about when looking at this
work-- how a lot of painting
tries to hide the
fact that it is indeed
made of a viscous substance
while a Pollock allows the pain
to revel in its
true liquid self.
You can think about how
the picture plane is
at once shallow and dense and
also overwhelmingly expansive,
pointing to the infinity
that lies beyond.
You can make note of the
variety of markings and textures
and the tension between
planning and accident.
What's the difference really
between drawing directly
on the canvas or in the
space just above it?
Everything and
nothing it turns out.
That bit of distance
relinquishes authorship
and allows gravity and chance
and life to play a part.
It's in that distance that we
reside when with his work--
in that nebulous area between
conscious and unconscious
thought and action where so
much of life can be found.
These pictures are
not easy to read.
There is no beginning
and no end really--
an idea Pollock
considered a compliment.
In these lines and
layers and residues,
there is new information
blotting out old.
There are vast networks
of markings-- what Kaprow
called the endless tangle.
Like an ocean or
a galaxy, we must
settle to a great degree
in their inscrutability.
In a similar sense,
we must also live with
and struggle to grasp as
Pollock so desperately did
the inscrutability within.
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