- Jackson Pollock represents
a kind of dead end on what he created,
because if someone else
does a drip picture
then it just feels like thievery.
(soothing music)
(dramatic music)
(bell tolls)
(gentle guitar music)
- [Narrator] I like to think
about American modernism
as having a much older origins.
An older foundational history
which allows us to think
about American moderns
such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood.
- [Narrator] Grant Wood
not only did advertising
and he did book illustration,
but he even represented
the Masonite company.
He represented furniture companies,
I mean he was quite an active artist
in the professional world.
(upbeat music)
- What's interesting about Benton
is that he's a modernist.
He goes and studies in
Paris for a number of years
and he studies all the isms.
Futurism and constructivism.
And mix it in with the
modern art techniques that he's learned.
And create a kind of dynamic modern art.
A representational kind
of art that'll be about
American stories, American people,
American places, and American history.
So he does a number of murals.
Well there are thousands of figures
in all of these different murals
and so he's always calling on his students
to pose for him, and Jackson Pollock
is one of those students who poses for him
in his America Today mural.
(pleasant music)
The federal government really becomes
the major cultural patron of the era.
A lot of the artists
who would become famous
or sort of make a name for themselves
in the post-war New York art world,
Jackson Pollock among them, Mark Rothko,
worked on the projects,
worked as New Deal
artists during the 1930s.
(pleasant music)
Benton always considered Pollock
one of his favorite students.
He would later say, "Well he went off
"in a different direction than me,"
and I think Pollock really
picked up from Benton
the idea of painting big, mural size,
large size painting spaces, nothing small,
but also a kind of dynamism,
a kind of movement and energy
that for Pollock and for Benton expressed
the dynamism of the modern 20th Century.
(pleasant plucky music)
- [Narrator] Just as the
metropolis of New York
is the center of transportation,
industry, and trade,
it is also a great cultural center.
Of all its many museums and art galleries,
none is more famous than the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(pleasant plucky music)
(jazz music)
- By the 1940s, particularly
by the mid-1940s,
right after the war, there are
a lot of artists in New York
and around the country who
are beginning to experiment
with different ways of painting
that are increasingly abstract,
increasingly non-objective.
Not so much centered on
American scene subjects,
spaces, places, focused more
on the artists themselves.
How they feel, what their thoughts are,
what their beliefs are.
The name that eventually
sort of becomes most popular
is abstract expressionism.
(jazz music)
- You could say that if
Peggy Guggenheim herself
had not existed, she
would have to be invented.
It was Peggy Guggenheim who
gave Pollock his start in life
really as an international artist
by commissioning Mural
in the summer of 1943.
- So she was brought up in a big mansion
not an apartment or anything,
and Peggy was expected
to grow up and marry,
to lead a very conventional life,
but she knew very early on that
hers was not gonna be a conventional life,
and she made sure it wasn't going to be
and this took all kinds of forms,
including sleeping with artists,
but more importantly
buying art and showing art
and she opened this legendary
gallery on 57th Street
that was called Art of the Century.
That sounds kind of
time I think to us now,
but it was really, she
was making a bold claim,
but it was also accurate.
I mean that was 20th Century art then.
- Very cutting edge,
very avant garde work,
and she also promoted and
cultivated the work of new artists
in a very energetic way.
One of these artists was Jackson Pollock.
- She came to realize that Pollock
was somebody that she
should pay attention to,
and in fact in her memoirs
she said that eventually
he became the whole point
of Art of the Century.
- What she started doing with this gallery
was showing and giving first one man shows
to Mark Rothko, Clyfford
Still, and most importantly
her big discovery was Pollock.
(jazz music)
She gave Pollock a contract,
the terms of which she
would pay him $150 a month.
That was unprecedented,
and to the other artists
this was like hitting a home
run in a World Series game.
She was gonna give Pollock his first show
and she decided there would
be a party at her apartment
and that she wanted
Pollock to design a mural
for the entryway to her building.
- It was an enormous space, and
we know that Jackson Pollock
in the summer of 1943, wrote
to a family member saying,
"It's as exciting as all hell."
That shows the kind of kick and impetus
which a commission for the
mural wall had given Pollock.
- Peggy Guggenheim being the
most important art patron
had a lot of influence over him.
We are fairly sure that his
materials were chosen by her.
This was going to be the
biggest, best painting
that Jackson Pollock had done
in his career up to that point
and would launch him
as an important artist
in the US and in the world.
(horns honking)
- Peggy Guggenheim had
given him this commission,
and months and months, and
she bought him the canvas
you know and he stretched it
and they had to knock a wall
out of their apartment, which
they weren't allowed to do,
you know which they basically
you know in the dark of night
they hacked away at the wall
and they put pieces of it in buckets
and they got rid of it in the alley.
And the painting was
supposed to be delivered
so that Peggy could show
it at a New Year's party
and like two days before
that he hadn't even made
one mark on it, according to Krasner.
And according to Krasner she went to bed,
and the next morning she found
Pollock covered with paint
and realized what this meant
and went into that room
that they had ripped apart,
and there it was, the whole thing.
(gentle piano music)
And she must have realized
that there was no way
that that painting could have
been painted in one night
and rolled up the next day
and taken to Peggy Guggenheim
'cause there were different layers
and it was,
you know it wouldn't have
dried in time and so forth.
- Then the legend goes
that Duchamp was there,
and Peggy and a workman
when it was being installed,
and the legend is that it was too big
and Duchamp said oh
well, let me just do this
and then he cut off seven inches of it.
He said it doesn't matter
with these kind of paintings, supposedly.
A, Duchamp would never have done that
and B, if you look at
the canvas it was not,
you know it has white space around it.
It was not cut off.
- Well despite the
legendary image of Pollock
as a kind of superhero of modern art,
he himself was not a
particularly large guy.
He wasn't that tall.
Mural unlike the
so-called classic drawings
which Jackson Pollock did in 1947 to 50,
they were painted on the floor.
Mural was already stretched
and leaning against the wall
when Pollock painted it,
so there's a crucial
difference in that respect.
The sheer physical size of Mural,
approximately nine foot high,
getting on towards 20 foot long
was absolutely unprecedented for Pollock
and this meant that
Pollock had a tremendous
degree of energy which he
projected into that canvas.
We know that from internal evidence,
Mural was not begun until
at least July of 1943.
Pollock was also a very calculated artist,
so what we have to remember
just splashing paint out on a canvas
will not necessarily produce the effect
in the beholder of extreme spontaneity.
Spontaneity has to be calculated
and configured on the canvas,
and Mural despite the frenzy
of its overall appearance
is a highly calculated canvas.
It so happens that the
Museum of Modern Art
held a huge exhibition in the late summer
and early autumn of 1943
devoted to actual
photography across the whole
of the late 19th and
earlier 20th Centuries.
I have not the slightest doubt
speaking as an art historian
that Pollock saw that exhibition.
- [Narrator] Pollock was quite familiar
with the action photography.
These sort of marching
figures are very close to
action photographs.
- This painting was really meant to be his
big world splash where
he announced to everyone
that he arrived.
This was meant to be for
her apartment in New York,
so it had to fit into the hallway
that she wanted to place
it and this hallway was
the entry point for everyone
who visited Peggy Guggenheim
and so everyone from the art world
would walk through this hallway
and know who Jackson Pollock was.
(jazz music)
- Peggy Guggenheim
commissioned the picture,
and endorsed Pollock
after Mondrian and Duchamp
gave her the nudge and said
this guy's really good.
And it was Duchamp who suggested
putting it on canvas
rather than painting it
directly on the wall,
which was very very smart.
One, he could work on it
at home in contemplation
and worry about it and fret over it there,
and also it meant it could be taken down.
- The critic Clement
Greenberg for example,
who was the biggest champion
of post-war American modernism
and it really is for
Greenberg American modernism,
and it's very much about
canvas and paint on canvas.
So he helps create a sort of
assumption about modern art
that is very flat, very
pure, almost one dimensional
and at the same time he's
emphasizing the freedom
and individuality of these
post-war American artists,
and he uses the word free and freedom
repeatedly in his essays
and he's writing for Partisan
Review and The Nation
and Commentary.
Well it's interesting if
you look at his criticism
to realize that at the very same time
that he's writing about the
freedom and individuality
of American artists like Pollock,
that the American government politically
is setting up the same sort of idea
that the United States of America
in direct and deliberate
contrast with communist Russia,
and communist China, has
free individual liberties
which include the free individual
styles of American artists
in direct contrast to the more
rigid representational art
that's produced by social
realist artists in Russia.
When he's writing in the mid-1940s,
he's made it clear that America is now
sort of the economic and
political leader of the world
and it needs an art to match,
and that art he decides,
declares is the art of Jackson Pollock.
- In the early 20th
Century, I mean painters
were kind of considered sissies.
You know you have them
in berets and smocks
and little scarves around their necks
and they stand there you know with a brush
and kind of, they look silly..
But Pollock doesn't look silly.
He's an action man.
(percussive music)
(booming)
- You know during the Cold
War abstract expressionism
was advanced as the American art form,
and regionalism which
I think a lot of people
now see as a quintessential
American art form
was sort of turned and
viewed as commu-Nazi art,
and that's not my term,
that's the term that
they used at the time.
(jazz music)
- The CIA becomes involved
because the State Department
organizes a few exhibits of American art,
and then ships them around Europe
and the art that's exhibited
it really has the agenda of demonstrating
American principles or tenets of freedom,
individuality, you know
our artists are so free
they can make art that nobody
understands or even likes,
but it doesn't matter 'cause
in America we're all free.
- Whereas abstract expressionism
was really seen as American freedom.
That artists could do
anything they wanted.
They could throw any paint
on a canvas and call it art,
whereas if you did that in
you know the Soviet Union,
then you would be locked up.
- Hey could you go that way?
- Move this more, move this more.
- Move this thing more.
Go on even lower.
- Go in a straight line.
- Straight!
- [Man] How forward?
- [Man] Now Susie you can
start moving toward the wall.
- [Man] I need four more inches.
- [Woman] Whoa whoa whoa okay.
We've got an inch before
we hit the sprinkler.
- [Man] Hey Kevin, can
you jack it up first?
- [Man] Could someone come and
hold this door on this side?
We probably wanna go the other side.
- [Woman] Watch the sprinkler!
- [Man] Okay so all we have,
we have one hanging light
so we're gonna have to stay a little--
- [Man] We just hit something?
- Huh?
- What?
- [Woman] We're waiting for something.
That's fine.
Yeah these nice cement
floors help you do that.
(laughing)
- All right.
- All right, we're in the gallery.
- [Man] That looks good doesn't it?
- Yeah that's it.
- Crazy.
Today's my birthday.
- [Woman] Happy birthday.
(plucky music)
- So what's interesting
about the University of Iowa
is it really is sort of
Greenwich Village west,
beginning in the 1930s,
and this reputation that it has
of sort of an avant garde place
for both writers and painters
is established pretty early.
And a lot of this has to
do with such factors as
Iowa's one of the first places to open up
BFA and MFA programs.
Series of BFA and MFA programs,
such that I believe by the early forties
it's producing more MFAs
than any other university
in the United States.
But other factors include a
couple of artists in residence
at the University of Iowa
including Grant Wood,
and eventually Philip Guston.
(gentle guitar music)
Grant Wood, great native son
of Iowa born in Anamosa, Iowa,
becomes a artist in
residence at Iowa in 1934.
So he's an artist in residence at Iowa,
he's supposed to be teaching
classes, he's traveling a lot.
He's financially successful, more or less
and in comes a new guy
into the art department
as the new chair, and
believe this was in '36,
and this is Lester Longman.
Suffice to say, Grant
Wood and Lester Longman
do not get along.
- [Narrator] Longman took issue
with Grant Wood in many different ways
from the mundane to the profound.
He did not like the kind of
art that Grant Wood produced.
He didn't like regionalism.
He wanted the, what he
regarded as the provinciality
of all that Grant Wood
represented to go away.
- There's a story of Grant Wood
reporting on a colleague
for taking his students
to a Picasso exhibition in Chicago
and really accusing the professor
of taking the students down a bad path,
and so that professor was
fired as a result of that.
But the professor named H.W. Janson
who was quite important art historian
was rehired and then he made it
his mission to eliminate Grant Wood,
so you know it's a typical
academic department.
Lester Longman, the new
director of the school of art,
he had recently established
the MFA and the BFA programs.
The basis for the University of Iowa
was the employment of professional
artists as professors.
- And he started working
very energetically
with New York gallery dealers,
recognizing that in the summertime
New York galleries
often closed their doors
because it was hot, no air conditioning,
nobody went to New York in the summertime,
nobody bought art in the summertime,
and Longman took advantage of that
to essentially arrange
for fairly large shipments
of very cutting edge, brand new,
modernist abstract
international modernist art
to come to the University of Iowa campus
for what he called the Summer
Contemporary Art Shows.
(pleasant jazz music)
And they brought a remarkable array
of contemporary art to campus.
Gathering the attention
not only of local press,
and statewide press, but national press.
- So this famous Iowa program
attracted Peggy Guggenheim,
and when Peggy Guggenheim decided
to move back to Europe in 1947,
she was looking at institutions
that shared her approach
to art and artists
and Lester Longman was
able to connect with her
and convince her that
the University of Iowa
was the place to park a lot of her works.
- So she wrote to her
friend Lester Longman
and said, "I'm shipping you a painting.
"I hope you would like it.
"You'll have to pay the shipment,
but it's yours for free."
- It took a few more years
for Pollock's Mural to arrive
because the professors argued
over the $40 shipping fee,
but it eventually arrived,
but the key point I want to make is that
the works of art were given
to the University of Iowa
in the late forties while
they were still fresh
and in some cases, while the
paint was probably still wet.
- It's phenomenal to me that it would
suddenly show up in this midwestern city
and I'm not sure by then whether it was
being appreciated for what it was,
you know which is a
really pivotal painting
in 20th Century art history.
- The public was not familiar
with this kind of art.
They were mystified by it and
sometimes disturbed by it.
- Mural was placed in the mural studio,
and the mural studio was
created by Grant Wood
when he ran the WPA program
and created murals for that program.
And so, it represented in many ways
everything that Grant Wood was not,
and for Lester Longman
symbolized perhaps the new dawn
of abstract expressionist art
both in the art program and in America.
The irony of course is
that it's then the place
where Jackson Pollock's Mural was placed,
and Jackson Pollock's Mural
is not like a Grant Wood mural at all.
It represents something totally different,
and actually it's something
that Grant Wood would
highly disapprove of.
- I'm absolutely convinced that this place
and that controversy was
very little known, but really fundamental
and rather profound turning point
in the history of American art.
- Then it's moved towards
the end of the 1950s
to the newly constructed
University of Iowa library,
and it hangs there for a while.
Then begins an interesting
series of letters
and correspondence
between Peggy Guggenheim
and the president of
the University of Iowa
in which basically Guggenheim had heard,
and this wasn't true, that
the mural had been demoted
to hanging in some student dining hall,
and she was outraged by this
and demanded that the
mural be returned to her
in Venice, Italy and
would he be interested
in the exchange of a 1920s painting
by the French artist Georges Braque.
- The painting probably came into
the museum collection in 1969,
because it was part of the
university's collection
but we didn't have a museum until 1969.
So when the museum was built,
a lot of these paintings that were
acquired by the art department
and some of them were things that
I think that one time there was
a committee that selected art
that was part of the faculty,
so there was a collection of
things that the university had
and they became part of
the museum collection,
so I'm fairly certain
that the Pollock Mural
came in at that time.
- Seeing the Jackson
Pollock in the Museum of Art
was sort of centered me, and I have to say
that as my three small
children were growing up
we didn't have a lot of time,
but I did get a babysitter
every Friday afternoon,
and I would walk down to the Museum of Art
and I would sit in one of
their wonderful Eames chairs
for three hours,
and I would just study it.
It became sort of my rock, if you can say
there is an external, something
external in the world.
Some people have religion, churches.
It was art for me.
(people chattering)
(soothing music)
- Well it rained a lot
over the weekend up north,
and it was apparent that it
was definitely gonna flood.
Very much it's gonna go over
the spillway quite a bit,
and it was gonna get into the building.
First thing we did obviously
was move the Pollock out,
and the major paintings.
Friday the 13th, it
finally decided to flood
and I was still hopeful that we would have
most of Friday to pack.
'Cause we'd been doing
some night work all week.
- In 2008 there was a
major flood that flooded
much of the University of Iowa campus,
particularly the arts campus
and the museum had to be evacuated,
so the art was moved to Chicago
and then moved back to
Iowa to other museums,
including Pollock's Mural.
- So we were quite lucky, very lucky.
But it's still...
Most of the high water marks around town
you can't see, except maybe on the bridges
but we still, you know the staff
still has its high water marks.
You can tell.
You can see the water marks
on the people at times.
- In the aftermath of the flood,
because the University of
Iowa buildings were devastated
in so many different ways,
the cost of repairs so high
that one of the proposals
that came out of the non-university sector
was that perhaps the Pollock
Mural painting could be sold
because it was valued after all
at something around 150 million dollars,
and that would go a long way
towards some major flood repairs.
Very quickly there is a bill put forward
in the Iowa legislature
in which a congressman,
a congressional representative
makes a requirement in this
bill that the mural be sold
and that the proceeds be used to pay
for undergraduate scholarships
at the University of Iowa.
- And ultimately after
checking into some things
it was discovered that there was a letter
from Peggy Guggenheim saying essentially
that if we no longer wanted the picture,
that she would be glad to have it back.
So, it is not possible for
us to sell the picture.
We would have to give it back
to the Guggenheim Foundation.
- After the flood, the
museum decided to pursue
a number of projects that it
could not have done before.
The collection was in
flux, it was moving around.
The Getty being the most
important conservation department
that we had contacts with,
and so they could do things
like restore and conserve paintings.
We decided to speak to them to see
if they were willing to do the painting.
(pleasant music)
- So I said great, what
do you have in mind?
Well there's this Pollock in Iowa,
and my first question
was well how big is it?
And when he told me, I said
absolutely not, that's too big
because large pictures have
problems all of their own,
just even moving a large
picture requires a team effort.
- This is a big project,
and it's not an easy project
so it's understandable that they were
not willing to take this on.
In about 2011, I contacted them again
and I decided to be
inclusive about my approach
and I copied the curator of
paintings, Scott Schaefer,
on the note that I sent to the
head of conservation there.
- And Scott Schaefer was
so excited at this idea
that the painting would come here,
and he made a point to me
that I thought was relevant
and that is that it was quite clear
that the painting needed not
only conservation attention
but it also needed some study.
There were a lot of myths
surrounding the painting
that had circulated around
it for years, so I said yes.
(laughs)
But only, I said a conditional yes,
and that was based on our wanting
to go and see the painting
before we actually agreed to take it on.
So a team of us, the core team of us,
flew to Iowa to visit it
at the Figge Art Museum
and where we spent a day
looking at the painting
and doing our first sort
of close look of it.
And we all came away from that trip
very excited about the possibility
that the painting would come here.
(people chattering)
We knew that we were on a schedule
and we were also holding
a series of meetings
during the treatment.
Meetings bringing other conservators here,
other scholars here, who
either had treated Pollock
or had written about Pollock
or understood the painting
perhaps more than we did.
When the painting was treated
in the early seventies,
by a conservator, a very
well intentioned conservator,
that conservator had
varnished the painting
and in doing so he had
put on a synthetic resin
that had the effect of veiling
that original diverse surface.
(people chattering)
- You imagine taking a Q-tip
and cleaning the varnish
off a 20 foot by 8 1/2 foot white painting
is a very long process.
It's excruciating.
- Removing in this case a
very gray discolored varnish,
it was gray because it was synthetic
opened up the space in a way
that was entirely unexpected,
and in particular the
unpainted areas of ground
which really form areas of
repose in this composition
which is just a riot of movement.
- Everything that we did
was slightly complicated
by its large size.
For example, even to take
an X-ray of the painting,
we couldn't do in our normal way
because our room where we
normally X-ray pictures
could not accommodate
a picture of this size,
so we had to hire outside people
to come to the Getty and
take the X-ray for us.
- Yeah so that's a nice sharp edge.
- Where you looking at?
- The transition edge.
- Over here.
- Yep see how sharp it goes?
- Yeah yeah okay.
- [Man] So that's that.
- Much of the work that
I did on the project
was looking at the paint
cross sections in detail,
and from that we were able
to completely reconstruct
the palette that Pollock used
in the creation of Mural,
and to also identify how
many different combinations
or mixes of paint that he used,
and we think that Mural is created
in about 25 to 26
different batches of paint.
Many of the layers in the
cross sections that we examined
have very well defined boundaries
with the underlying layers
and usually that means the lower paint
was at least touch dry or
dry enough to withstand
being disrupted by the
later applications of paint.
So these clear boundaries indicate
that the painting was done
over quite extended period of time.
Oil paint takes several days
if not sometimes weeks to dry.
Pollock did something quite unconventional
and there's another paint in
the middle sequence of painting
that is actually we think a
cheap commercial house paint,
probably an interior paint for walls.
And that paint is based on casein
which is a protein derived from
milk, and it's water based.
And water and oil don't
mix, so it's very unusual
for an artist to be combining
a water based medium
with an oil based medium
in the same painting.
- We were very intrigued
by this pink paint
that has an appearance of a house paint,
a sort of glossy enamel paint,
and perhaps had been applied horizontally
which we know Pollock was
doing later on in his career.
So what we're doing at
the moment is just seeing
if we can use the materials
that we think Pollock
had access to in 1943
and keeping the canvas vertically
whether we can achieve
some of the same effects
that we've seen on the painting.
- [Woman] Who hasn't
gone up on a ladder yet?
(laughing)
- We did do a mock up of the painting
in order to better understand
how it would be installed,
how it would look on the wall.
In planning the treatment there
were essentially two areas
that needed to be addressed.
Both the aesthetic concerns,
in this case the varnish
that was on the painting,
and then also the structural concerns.
The stretcher and the fact that
there were now areas of unpainted canvas
on the face of the painting.
- The stretcher that he
used to stretch the canvas
was not strong enough, so
it must have started to sag
very early on in its life.
And the consequences of that sag
and what to do about it
and the 1970s treatment
were a big part of our work.
- And so after a great
deal of deliberation
and a great deal of study,
we made the decision
to put the canvas on a shape stretcher,
and once that decision was made,
the actual outcome of the
treatment remained still very much
up to the painting to reteach those old
tacking margin turnover lines
to a painting that has been wax lined,
because it's not just the canvas
and not just the original painting,
there's the added complication
of the wax resin adhesive
which is somewhat brittle,
and then additionally a secondary canvas.
So not only do you have
the added thickness,
but those two canvases must
move against one another.
- I think it was one of the
top three or four exhibitions
here at the Getty in terms of
numbers of people who came,
percentage of visitors to the Getty
who came to see that painting.
But they came in great numbers
because of course it
is this iconic picture
in his oeuvre, in his career,
but also in the development
of contemporary American painting,
and then they had access to this painting
as they don't typically have access,
because they had all
the didactic materials
related to the conservation project
and the investigation of the picture.
- I was invited to see
Mural when it first arrived,
before the restoration
and it was absolutely fantastic
and that can only mean that the
restoration was even better.
It was brighter and
stretched more perfectly
and it's a glorious, glorious thing
and the Getty did a
real service to humanity
by restoring that picture.
(pleasant music)
- I called Sean.
I knew the painting was at
the Getty being conserved,
so I said why don't we plan to have it
come by the Sioux City Art Center
on its way back to its home base?
And he said well, that might not be
as far fetched as you think.
And we started talking about it.
I told him that we could
raise the funds to do our part
and that he was concerned
about the facility
and if we could bring it into the facility
because it's a very large piece.
Was in a very large crate at the time.
Since then the crate was
made a little bit smaller,
so it made it easier,
but we were going to have to
take down the front entrance
to the art center to get it in originally,
and then that changed and we were able to
get it into the loading dock,
but in order to get it into the gallery
we did replace an eight foot door
with a 10 foot door, and
remove a temporary wall
so that we could accommodate it
in our permanent collection gallery.
When it arrived, it was all very exciting.
We were all crossing our fingers
that we all measured correctly.
It just grazed a few things on
the way in, but very lightly
and was able to get it into the gallery.
We let it acclimate for a
day, took it out the next day,
in its amazing crate, very
elaborate crating system.
Took all day to put it on the wall,
and here it is.
- Okay one two three.
(groaning)
- Perfect.
- Oh man!
(applauding)
- And when it leaves the
Sioux City Art Center,
it will go to Venice and
then it'll go to Berlin.
From Berlin it'll go to Amsterdam,
Amsterdam to London, and then
back to the United States
going to Washington DC.
So we're part of a very
exclusive circuit of museums
that will be showing the
Pollock before it returns home.
When the University of Iowa
builds its new art museum
it'll be housed there, and obviously
because of its pristine condition,
this is getting to see
the mural in this state
is like seeing it the first
year that Pollock painted it.
- [Narrator] This
painting was never viewed
in that part of the country
and it was a great
opportunity to be able to
reach a new audience,
and also pursue the idea
that Peggy Guggenheim advocated
which was that this was part
of an educational program.
That this painting was
there to show people
about new American art.
New ways of approaching art.
About ways that Jackson Pollock
solved certain problems on the canvas,
and so she would've been
very proud of the way
that we're using this painting
to educate a wider audience.
(gentle piano music)
- [Woman] Yeah.
- And it's like, one of its eyes is black,
one of it's like yellow.
And it's cool.
(gentle piano music)
(lively accordion music)
(somber violin music)
- On this boat is a substantial crane,
which then serves to lift
the crate, massive and heavy,
onto an ad hoc ramp which enabled us then
to slide the picture effortlessly
into the hallway of the palace,
but this will always be the case
when we're doing exhibitions.
Aquatic arrivals and you know manpower
and cranes to winch the
crates into the building
or into our exhibition spaces behind.
(people chattering)
We were flattered, but also
aware of something inevitable
when the Mural was to
begin its European tour
at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
It made perfect sense for our mission.
David exhibition has the peculiarity
that would placing it
inside Peggy's palazzo
and not in our temporary
exhibition galleries.
We might have done, but
they're far too small
to take something as outsize as the mural,
and so it's been exhibited inside
together with Peggy's permanent collection
in the company of some of the Pollocks
that Peggy herself owned.
The museum will open
as normal to the public
and they will find, to their astonishment,
these magnificent paintings.
(speaks foreign language)
- Well the Pollock Mural
is extraordinary for several reasons.
Being one of his early commissions,
he's responding to Peggy
Guggenheim's request
for something magisterial, large, show-off
and he has hit the bun every time.
(speaks foreign language)
- The Venice Biennale
is the most important
modern art show in the world.
It takes place every two years,
and the Guggenheim
Foundation is responsible
for presenting the American offering.
- One way or another, Jackson Pollock
is one of those artists like
Picasso, Dali, Warhol, Monet.
I mean he's up in that league isn't he?
And as it happens, 2015 is a year
of the Venice Arts Biennale,
and so a particularly qualified audience
will be coming through this city,
and my assumption is they'll
all come to see the Iowa Mural.
(soothing music)
- [Narrator] The Pollock Mural
is really a wonderful story
of modernism's mobility.
- [Narrator] Mural is an icon.
It's a striking enough painting in itself,
but in terms of its influence,
its influence was absolutely enormous.
- [Narrator] It does have
a kind of aura to it.
Has a kind of magic to it,
but it was also made by hand.
- [Narrator] I would say
that not a week goes by
that Pollock's name is not
mentioned in the New York Times
and 70% of it is in a context
that has nothing to do with art.
- [Narrator] Mural is still, I feel,
somewhat figurative.
I get the impression of
dancing figures in the blacks.
- [Narrator] He famously compared it,
or said he was trying to
paint a horse stampede,
and once you hear that you
can see that in the painting.
I'm not sure if you can
before, but there's something
very visceral and very active
and very even violent,
like a stampede going on in that painting.
- [Narrator] I was
daunted by the scale of it
and by the complexity of it,
and wondering how we were going
to try and make sense of it
and that's one of the satisfying
things from the projects.
I think we've been able
to comprehend it better
from the technical point of view.
It still has many mysteries in it.
- [Narrator] Working on Mural
was an incredible privilege,
and quite frankly having
the University of Iowa
send it to the Getty was
a tremendous act of faith,
and we took it as a very
serious responsibility
and it was really one
of the great privileges
of my career thus far, and I suspect
I will feel that way
for many years to come.
- [Narrator] With a
picture like the Pollock,
I'll have to make a special
trip to Iowa to see it again.
- [Narrator] As issues of
money and cultural capital
take precedent, you
know it's understanding
what that work of art is all about
shifts and moves back and forth.
- [Narrator] The painting
didn't arrive here by accident.
It was actually placed
here because it was part of
the larger development of the art program
and its relationship
with patrons and artists.
- [Narrator] It's ultimately
more than whatever
million dollar price tag
might be attached to it.
- [Narrator] Mural really
belongs to Iowa for many reasons
and it should stay in Iowa forever
because it is the essence of
Iowa, and its art program.
(soothing music)
(upbeat jazz music)
