Tweet
Jackson Pollock 'transcends time and fashion'
Friday 27 January 2012
Telegraph.co.uk
Jackson Pollock's centenary, on 28 January, reminds us that the
American is one of those artists whose heroic achievements transcend
time and fashion.
Image 1 of 3
A section of "No5, 1948" an Abstract Expressionist work by Jackson
Pollock. The painting was sold for $140 million in 2006.
Image 1 of 3Jackson Pollock at work in 1945. He was born a century
ago on 28 January 1912. Photo: Everett Collection / Rex Feature.
Image 1 of 3Artist Jackson Pollock, who was born in Wyoming, died in
a drink-driving car accident on August 11, 1956, at the age of 44.
By Mark Hudson
Art today, we are constantly being told, is about ideas rather than
objects. Painting has been reduced to a marginal, niche activity,
while `expression', the working out of feelings through art, is about
as `out' as it possibly could be.
So who then at the cutting edge is interested in Jackson Pollock, the
father of so-called Action Painting, who became internationally
notorious for letting it all hang out on canvas? The answer is, just
about everybody. For Pollock is one of those artists whose heroic
achievements transcend time and fashion. He is one of the people who
got us where we are today, not only in terms of art, but in
understanding who we are.
When Pollock, who was born 100 years ago on 28 January 1912, began
painting in the 1930s, progressive American art was a hickish offshoot
of the European avant garde. Arshile Gorky, the Armenian painter who
was to become a major catalyst in American art, observed that his
American contemporaries not only didn't understand the European models
they were drawing on, they didn't even comprehend the significance of
their own work. Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist cohorts -
Rothko, de Kooning, Newman et al - were the artists who changed all
that, who made American painting the dominant phenomenon in
international art, shifting the focus of the art world from Paris to
New York. Yet Pollock's significance extends far beyond his impact on
American art.
Before Pollock, paintings were created on easels, conceived, executed
and seen from one direction only, as they had been for centuries. Not
even Picasso changed that. But Pollock, wrestling with the problems of
Surrealism, of how to get deeper into the internal subject of the
work, began to work on the floor on unstretched canvas with very
liquid paint, leaving the idea of a pre-meditated subject far behind.
While the resulting paintings, dripped, rather than daubed onto the
canvas, were hung on the wall with a definite `right side' up, they
were approached in their making from several angles at once - an
effect the critic Clement Greenberg described as `all over' - with the
artist standing on the canvas, physically inside the painting as he
was creating it.
It was one of those moments, as pivotal as Masaccio's adoption of
perspective and Picasso's cubistic renunciation of it, that change the
way we see art and the world. It was a challenge to human perception
that provoked a massive, and largely hostile response.
If just about all the great Modernist breakthroughs had been made by
1920 - and the seeds even of Pop Art are apparent in the Dadaism of
the First World War - Pollock's breakthrough feels like something that
could only have taken place in the Post-War period, and only in
America. The sheer size of his paintings - which makes European
Modernist works appear pygmy-like, even tentative - is, as has often
been observed, analogous to the scale of the American landscape. His
work's aspiration towards total freedom is synchronous with, and to a
degree precipitated, the great opening up of the human spirit, the
democratisation of self-expression, that began in the 1950s and is
still going on today.
Yet if Pollock's work appears anarchic, great paintings such as `Blue
Poles' and `Autumn Rhythm' are in fact carefully organised with a
symphonic feel for shifts in rhythm and scale.
Finally, Pollock's tragic personality - his alcoholism, bi-polar
condition and death at 44 in a car crash - is intrinsic to the way we
see his work. Like van Gogh he is one of those artists who we feel
sacrificed themselves for their art, to whom we feel a kind of
gratitude for what they were able to bring back from the troubled
extremities of the human soul; a gratitude that is romantic, but not
entirely unwarranted. Pollock's work doesn't shock the way it once
did. Most of us would now love to have a Pollock in our sitting room.
Yet it continues to ask powerful questions about the limits of human
expression, aspiration and perception - questions the rest of us are
just beginning to get to grips with.
Friday 27 January 2012
Telegraph.co.uk
Jackson Pollock's centenary, on 28 January, reminds us that the
American is one of those artists whose heroic achievements transcend
time and fashion.
Image 1 of 3
A section of "No5, 1948" an Abstract Expressionist work by Jackson
Pollock. The painting was sold for $140 million in 2006.
Image 1 of 3Jackson Pollock at work in 1945. He was born a century
ago on 28 January 1912. Photo: Everett Collection / Rex Feature.
Image 1 of 3Artist Jackson Pollock, who was born in Wyoming, died in
a drink-driving car accident on August 11, 1956, at the age of 44.
By Mark Hudson
Art today, we are constantly being told, is about ideas rather than
objects. Painting has been reduced to a marginal, niche activity,
while `expression', the working out of feelings through art, is about
as `out' as it possibly could be.
So who then at the cutting edge is interested in Jackson Pollock, the
father of so-called Action Painting, who became internationally
notorious for letting it all hang out on canvas? The answer is, just
about everybody. For Pollock is one of those artists whose heroic
achievements transcend time and fashion. He is one of the people who
got us where we are today, not only in terms of art, but in
understanding who we are.
When Pollock, who was born 100 years ago on 28 January 1912, began
painting in the 1930s, progressive American art was a hickish offshoot
of the European avant garde. Arshile Gorky, the Armenian painter who
was to become a major catalyst in American art, observed that his
American contemporaries not only didn't understand the European models
they were drawing on, they didn't even comprehend the significance of
their own work. Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist cohorts -
Rothko, de Kooning, Newman et al - were the artists who changed all
that, who made American painting the dominant phenomenon in
international art, shifting the focus of the art world from Paris to
New York. Yet Pollock's significance extends far beyond his impact on
American art.
Before Pollock, paintings were created on easels, conceived, executed
and seen from one direction only, as they had been for centuries. Not
even Picasso changed that. But Pollock, wrestling with the problems of
Surrealism, of how to get deeper into the internal subject of the
work, began to work on the floor on unstretched canvas with very
liquid paint, leaving the idea of a pre-meditated subject far behind.
While the resulting paintings, dripped, rather than daubed onto the
canvas, were hung on the wall with a definite `right side' up, they
were approached in their making from several angles at once - an
effect the critic Clement Greenberg described as `all over' - with the
artist standing on the canvas, physically inside the painting as he
was creating it.
It was one of those moments, as pivotal as Masaccio's adoption of
perspective and Picasso's cubistic renunciation of it, that change the
way we see art and the world. It was a challenge to human perception
that provoked a massive, and largely hostile response.
If just about all the great Modernist breakthroughs had been made by
1920 - and the seeds even of Pop Art are apparent in the Dadaism of
the First World War - Pollock's breakthrough feels like something that
could only have taken place in the Post-War period, and only in
America. The sheer size of his paintings - which makes European
Modernist works appear pygmy-like, even tentative - is, as has often
been observed, analogous to the scale of the American landscape. His
work's aspiration towards total freedom is synchronous with, and to a
degree precipitated, the great opening up of the human spirit, the
democratisation of self-expression, that began in the 1950s and is
still going on today.
Yet if Pollock's work appears anarchic, great paintings such as `Blue
Poles' and `Autumn Rhythm' are in fact carefully organised with a
symphonic feel for shifts in rhythm and scale.
Finally, Pollock's tragic personality - his alcoholism, bi-polar
condition and death at 44 in a car crash - is intrinsic to the way we
see his work. Like van Gogh he is one of those artists who we feel
sacrificed themselves for their art, to whom we feel a kind of
gratitude for what they were able to bring back from the troubled
extremities of the human soul; a gratitude that is romantic, but not
entirely unwarranted. Pollock's work doesn't shock the way it once
did. Most of us would now love to have a Pollock in our sitting room.
Yet it continues to ask powerful questions about the limits of human
expression, aspiration and perception - questions the rest of us are
just beginning to get to grips with.