Let me say at the start that
this was a spectacular exhibition. In my
experience it has only been equaled at MoMA by
William Rubin’s retrospective of Pablo Picasso
in 1980. Its curators, Kirk Varnedoe [hereafter
KV] and Pepe Karmel [hereafter PK], whatever I
may say later about the details of this show’s
selection and interpretation, are here
congratulated for bringing Pollock’s art before
the public in so splendid and spacious an
environment.
The exhibition, and the
ancillary shows elsewhere in the museum, provide
access to nearly 200 representative works by
Pollock in all media. For most ordinary art
lovers in this country, Pollock’s work has been
sparsely available. There are only about a dozen
visible examples in New York at any given time.
Most of these, it must be said, are at MoMA,
where William Lieberman, the curator of the
first Pollock retrospective there in 1967, and
William Rubin, a vociferous enthusiast for his
work, collected Pollock in depth. That number
just about doubles when considering the visible
Pollock holdings of the other museums between
Boston and Washington. While these museums’
holdings of other paintings, drawings and prints
greatly expand these numbers, they are seldom on
public view. It would also take an intrepid
Pollock lover of heroic stamina to ferret out
the rest in our nation’s other museums -- say in
Buffalo, Utica, Iowa City, Omaha, St Louis,
Seattle, etc. (Indeed, it is easier to see
Vermeer; nearly a third of his oeuvre is visible
on the east coast of this country!)
Several friends, long aware of
my interest in Pollock, have told me that for
the first time, after viewing the current MoMA
exhibit, they had come to understand just what
Pollock had achieved. (It is unclear if they
thought me crazy earlier. . . .) Further, it is
to be hoped that several new generations of art
lovers -- all of whom seemed to have left their
discos to crash MoMA on the night of its formal
opening -- will have similar epiphanies. So all
praise and thanks to the curators, their staff
and the sponsors of this exhibition, for making
it possible, and bringing it off with such
glorious visual panache.
MoMA’s Pollock exhibition opened
late in October 1998. I followed this important
event in some detail, primarily because I have
been involved with Pollock as a scholar since my
dissertation at The Johns Hopkins University in
1965. Two years later, I wrote the text for the
catalogue of MoMA’s first Pollock
retrospective--whose curator was William S.
Lieberman (now head of 20th Century Art at the
Metropolitan Museum). In 1978, I co-edited the
catalogue raisonné of Pollock’s work with the
art dealer, Eugene Victor Thaw, and in 1995,
edited a supplement to that catalogue for the
Pollock-Krasner Foundation. I have also been a
member of the several committees that decided on
the authenticity of works attributed to Pollock
since about 1973. So this exhibition and its
scholarly, curatorial, critical and cultural
ramifications shall be watched here with special
interest.
Review No. 9 was posted on
November 1, 1998.
Review No. 9A (excerpt) --
Pollock in Utopia: A Tour of
the Exhibition
Introduction
Blue is the color of this
exhibition, its photo logo being a shot of
Pollock painting, taken from below by Hans
Namuth through a sheet of plate glass in the
fall of 1950. The artist is seen against the
sky, pouring elegant black lines. This image is
on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue, and
the CD of Pollock’s top seventeen jazz classics,
that can be seen in serried rows in the shop
just outside the entrance as you ascend the
escalator. When you open the catalogue, its
endpapers continue Pollock’s pouring process
with two more stills from the film -- that show
him obscuring his face behind a dense web of
poured lines.
That is exactly what, in a
sense, the show achieves. The exhibition’s point
is clear: To show the development of Pollock’s
pouring technique. When you read the catalogue,
you soon realize that its curators are really
interested in nothing else, the early work
through c. 1946 being disparaged; the late work
from 1951 on scanted. But curators do
exhibitions from a point of view, the view here
is legitimate if limited -- and the catalogue
shall be reviewed at 9B in respect to what it
contributes to our knowledge of the artist this
exhibition both reveals and conceals.
As you approach the entrance to
the exhibition, that occupies seventeen
galleries on MoMA’s entire third floor, you see
beyond a blue title wall an Orozco-influenced
naked man wielding a knife. His arm is seemingly
bitten by a second figure, while a third sprawls
(safely?) below them. Whether a curatorial
point, or a vista’s accident, it sets a certain
tone of arrested violence that pervades all that
is to follow in MoMA’s elegantly designed,
brilliantly illuminated and extravagantly
spacious installation. The surrounding luxury
somehow insulates the senses and makes you
forget the rage implicit in these works and the
essentialism that informs them -- and their
“impurity” of facture that even Varnedoe admits
(VK: 52).
Kirk Varnedoe, the curator of
this exhibition, addresses the matter of
Pollock’s essentialism in an interview by Sarah
Greenberg in The Art Newspaper (November 1998,
p. 31). There, he makes the point that Pollock’s
art “seems utterly unironic. It has no trace of
cynicism.” I agree. Pollock’s essentialism --
that I have discussed in the interpretive essays
(Pollock Watch Commentaries Nos. 1D to 1K) -- is
the opposite of irony -- even that which
pervades this paradoxical installation. Life for
Pollock was too puzzling, hard, and chthonic to
beat around the bush with tangentially clever
takes on anything. The instinctive tenor of his
mind was that of Occam’s razor: Get to the
essential point and cut the bullshit. When Hans
Hofmann, that future Abstract Expressionist
manqué, suggested Pollock study “nature” from a
studio set-up, he replied that he “was Nature.”
When a woman asked him how he knew when a poured
painting was finished, he asked how she knew
when sex was over. His bluntness -- his arrogant
disregard of others -- his impatience with
anything that did not get to the heart of art or
life could be as sharp as a knife -- even if art
or life bit back -- and the essential point
remained irretrievable.
POLLOCK WATCH
COMMENTARIES NOS. 1A TO 1Q
Introduction -- Going Down to
the Weave:
The Pollock Watch will offer a
series of interpretive essays on individual
works by Jackson Pollock. These are derived from
a lecture I gave in the summer of 1998: the
eleventh annual Pollock-Krasner Lecture,
sponsored by the State University of New York’s
Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center, that is
housed in the Pollocks’ home at East Hampton,
New York. It was given on August 16th at the
Guild Hall in East Hampton, and titled JACKSON
POLLOCK: DOWN TO THE WEAVE - A COMMENTARY ON A
SELECTION OF KEY WORKS. This was, in turn
derived from the draft manuscript of a book I
have been writing about Pollock of the same
title.
All references to works by
Jackson Pollock will mainly be to the following
two publications:
-- Francis V. O'Connor, and
Eugene V. Thaw, Co-editors, Jackson Pollock: A
Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and
Other Works. New Haven: Yale University Press, 4
Volumes, 1978. [Hereafter: JPCR. This is the
standard illustrated inventory of Pollock works,
with a handlist to his library and a documentary
chronology.]
-- See also Francis V. O'Connor,
Editor, Supplement Number One - Jackson Pollock:
A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and
Other Works. New York: The Pollock-Krasner
Foundation, 1995. [Hereafter JPCR-Sup1. This
adds 48 newly discovered works by Pollock to the
published oeuvre, includes new documents and
photographs, and a section of additions and
corrections to the JPCR]
Other publications shall be
cited in the text either in full, or by author,
date and page. For the latter, see the annotated
bibliography in the Comment section’s Pollock
Watch at No. 1C for full citations -- and other
books where reproductions can be found.
These interpretive essays will
not be illustrated for technical reasons, so I
shall provide a reference to the Pollock
catalogue raisonné. In general, the works
discussed shall be sufficiently described in the
text so the reader can understand what is being
said clearly enough. Where a good color
reproduction is available in one of the readily
available monographs in the bibliography, I
shall give a reference to that also.
Before discussing other works by
Pollock, let me describe the method I am
employing.
The phrase “down to the weave”
came to me spontaneously when writing a sonnet
about Pollock that was ultimately published in
the Art Journal’s fall issue in 1988. (I follow
the French poet and art critic Charles
Baudelaire’s notion that only poets should write
art criticism.) It is published here with a few
slight revisions:
The others cozen a space to
grope --
mess and measure the colored mud
till it tells. Given his rope,
he throws chance to knowing blood.
You can see the ages of his eye
down to the weave. To enthrall
monsters is to testify --
to reenact the primal brawl.
Unravel his skeins in space:
tease them out like DNA,
feature by feature's trace
down to the weave -- where they stay
oneiromancy’s vote
on spectra from young Joseph's coat.
Pollock was an individual
impatient with anything other than the most
direct route to a goal. This is typical of
someone severely injured early on by life.
Pollock was born strangled by the cord, an event
that left him with mild learning and motor
disabilities, and most probably, a precocious
vulnerability to alcohol. Such persons tend
always to be seeking, at least unconsciously,
the reasons for their affliction. The outward
manifestation of this is what I call an
aggressive essentialism. It is the psychological
equivalent of political radicalization: that is,
when a person is so afflicted by injustice that
life is meaningless until equity is restored.
Restoring equity, for Pollock then, was to get
to the bottom of things at the cost of all
intervening superficialities. In Pollock's art,
this is symbolized by the laying bare of the
historical process by which each work was
created. Its stages are clearly visible, most
often literally "down to the weave" of the
canvas -- thus the title of the lecture, and the
book I am writing.
No artist among the Abstract
Expressionists is more open about revealing the
stages that led up to the surface we see. This
vertical directionality down to the weave,
distinct from any device of perspective (though
at times contributing to the spatial drama of
the work), is the hallmark of the way Pollock
painted.
But people want to know what
Pollock’s works mean? This begs the question of
what "meaning" means when interpreting Pollock.
Here, I would suggest, meaning is the sum total
of three things:
-
what you feel on first
encountering the work,
-
what you can see of the
qualities of the work that made you feel as
you did,
-
what you can know about the
work’s imagery and intent, and the
historical origins and context from which,
and in which, it was created.
The point to stress here is that
the first levels of relevant information in the
quest for meaning are visceral and visual, not
verbal. These are the realities that I think
have been forgotten in the current "literature"
on Pollock -- and most serious art. Indeed, one
must come to the sad conclusion that for many
historians, biographers and critics today, the
works of art are not real as objects -- only the
theory of explanation is real. This lack of
empathy -- this inability to share in another's
emotions or feelings -- this inability to see,
and through perception, to feel through what is
actually there in the art work, but instead to
assert only what theory requires to be there --
makes all too much recent art commentary
tendentiously distortive, unenlightening, and
ultimately useless.
What follows applies the method
just described in the reviews of the show and
its catalogue, and in the commentaries on
specific works.
Find
out how much an artwork of Jackson Pollock is worth
