Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) not only put American art on the map with his famous "drip paintings," he also served as an inspiration for the character of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams'sA ...Streetcar Named Desire-the role that made Marlon Brando famous. Like Brando, Pollock became an icon of rebellion in 1950s America, and the brooding, defiant persona captured in photographs of the artist contributed to his celebrity almost as much as his notorious paintings did. In the years since his death in a drunken car crash, Pollock's hold on the public imagination has only increased. He has become an enduring symbol of the tormented artist-our American van Gogh.
In this highly engaging book, Evelyn Toynton examines Pollock's itinerant and poverty-stricken childhood in the West, his encounters with contemporary art in Depression-era New York, and his years in the run-down Long Island fishing village that, ironically, was transformed into a fashionable resort by his presence. Placing the artist in the context of his time, Toynton also illuminates the fierce controversies that swirled around his work and that continue to do so. Pollock's paintings captured the sense of freedom and infinite possibility unique to the American experience, and his life was both an American rags-to-riches story and a darker tale of the price paid for celebrity, American style.
« Au commencement, la toile blanche, vide ; puis le départ hésitant, puis la coulée de la peinture, du pot à la blancheur de la surface? » ? Hans Namuth. Né en 1912, dans une petite ville du Wyoming, ...Jackson Pollock incarne tous les mythes d?une Amérique en devenir, confrontée aux réalités d?un XIXe siècle qui s?éteint et d'un nouveau siècle qui s?installe dans un modernisme déstructurant les repères humains. Comme dans les romans, Pollock part à la conquête de New York et rapidement, grâce au Federal Act Project, il acquiert le succès, la renommée, et deviendra après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la première grande star de la peinture américaine. Courtisé, adulé, Pollock sera pour De Kooning « He broke the ice », pour Max Ernst et Masson, un compagnon des surréalistes européens, pour Motherwell, un prétendant au statut de maître de l?école américaine. Dans cette tourmente de la vie du New York des années 50, Pollock perd ses repères, succès trop facile, trop rapide, Pollock sombre dans l?alcoolisme, détruit son mariage avec Lee Krasner. Pour achever le mythe, il se devait d?en finir comme l?autre star de l?époque, James Dean : se tuer un soir de beuverie au volant de son Oldsmobile. Ce livre éclaire sous un jour nouveau la personnalité de Pollock à travers son oeuvre qui fait de lui un maître de l?expressionnisme abstrait américain.
"In 1947 Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) painted a canvas entitled Galaxy. It is one of four works that Pollock produced that year with titles inspired by the night sky. Together they constitute an ...important transition in Pollock's career, when he moved away from thickly painted, vaguely symbolic subjects toward the classic poured paintings of 1947 to 1950. Contemplating the unreachable galaxies of outer space offered Pollock an opportunity to reconsider his own conceptions of artistic space. From his early years as a painter, Pollock had been attracted to the sky on both literal and symbolic levels." (American Art) This analysis of Pollock's four celestially inspired paintings from 1947, Galaxy, Reflection of the Big Dipper, Shooting Star and Comet, illuminates "how in the bright night sky he seems to have found a kind of transcendence that he translated to his canvases with a power and energy that conjures up the sublime paths of the stars." Pollock's artistic evolution and his concepts of spirituality, form, space and sculptural mass are considered in the context of his artistic strategies.
The imagery in Jackson Pollock's three extant sketchbooks which date from c.1934-1939 is dependent on that of other artists, especially El Greco, Rubens and Tintoretto. By 1947 however, the painter ...achieved a mature synthesis, distinctly his, which influenced contemporary painting, and was seminal for the work of a number of artists of the succeeding era. This dissertation is an attempt to document the phases of Pollock's artistic style from the early 1930s through to the middle 1950s, and to investigate the forces which may have catalyzed his temperament and precipitated his late style. The early sketchbooks begun in c.1934 represent Pollock's engagement with the art of the Old Masters and the teaching techniques of Thomas Hart Benton that utilized works from the Renaissance. The third sketchbook from c.1937-1939 induced him to re-examine the work of the Old Masters in a dialectical approach which incorporated new masters with old, but remained preoccupied with the sacred imagery found in the first two books. It is a resolution of these seemingly opposing modes of representation which produced several influential paintings in the early 1940s, including Guardians of the Secret and Pasiphae. At the same time these works display structural emulations related to those of Old Master paintings that would become increasingly prominent in Pollock's art. The canvases of 1947-1950, produced in what is commonly termed the “Classic Poured Period,” appear to represent a quantum leap beyond the concerns of Old Master works and European precedents. By this point Pollock had developed a fluency and assurance in his use of color and line that seems to extend further than the studied paradigmatic repetitions of his early sketchbooks. However, despite the radically new technique his paintings still exhibit pictorial and formal infrastructures derived from Renaissance paintings which were absorbed into Pollock's new idiom with surprising ease. In 1951 Pollock enters what Francis V.O'Connor termed as ‘his fourth phase'. The Black paintings of 1951-1953 betray a further exploration and adaptation of Old Master ideas, both iconographic and aesthetic and were created in Triptychs and Diptychs, typical altarpiece formats. With these paintings Pollock's forms acquired a confident plasticity and invention derived from the sculptural practices of Michelangelo, and progressively fewer individual images are quoted verbatim. An understanding of Pollock's early preoccupation with old Master painting is essential to comprehend the formation of the aesthetics of much of his later art. Significantly the underlying infrastructure remains fixed to old Master precedents and it was precisely these models of Renaissance and Baroque art which became the medium through which his mature synthesis was achieved.
"Back in 2002, more than two dozen small paintings labeled POLLOCK EXPERIMENTS were found at the Home Sweet Home moving company in East Hampton, in a storage locker belonging to the late photographer ...and graphic artist Herbert Matter, a close friend of the painter's. Though the provenance was impeccable--these were not drip paintings picked up at a yard sale--a debate broke out over their authenticity once the trove's existence was announced in 2005. When the pictures are shown in public for the first time in 2007...the arguments are sure to erupt all over again--even though the works won't be labeled BY JACKSON POLLOCK." (Newsweek) Mysteries and conflicting scientific reports regarding the paintings' authenticity are discussed.
AMERICAN ABSTRACT Schjeldahl, Peter
The New Yorker,
07/2006, Volume:
82, Issue:
23
Magazine Article
Jackson Pollock "by destroying himself in 1956, oddly consecrated America's postwar cultural ascendancy. Sometimes a new, renegade sensibility really takes hold only when somebody is seen to have ...died for it. Tragedy enhanced Pollock's status as the first American painter, after the corn-belt realist Grant Wood, to achieve general popular renown, as a shining native son...The glowering Westerner who became known as Jack the Dripper seemed to speak not just for the country but as it, in person: the Great American Painter, at a moment that was hot for Great American thises and thats." (New Yorker) This profile of Pollock highlights his efforts "to reconcile boundless pictorial space...with raw, emotionally driven physicality." The difficulty of "separating the artist's legend from his work" is explored.
"Abstract expressionism was America's great aesthetic movement--or so said the artists. A new MoMA show may (unwittingly) make us reconsider that claim." (Newsweek) In this article, David ...Wallace-Wells ponders the question "how American was abstract expressionism, really?"
Action Figures Schjeldahl, Peter
The New Yorker,
05/2008, Volume:
84, Issue:
15
Magazine Article
"'Action/Abstraction,' at the Jewish Museum, is more a perambulatory essay than an art exhibition, though it incorporates some superb pieces: classic paintings by the rival godheads of Abstract ...Expressionism, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and fine works by other members of American art's greatest generation (notably Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still)." (New Yorker) This essay illuminates the vastly influential American art work derived from the 1950s which is on display at the Jewish Museum's "Action/Abstraction" art exhibit. In addition to the previously mentioned contributors, "Action/Abstraction" will also play host to the works of Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Arshile Gorky. "The New York avant-garde art world of the nineteen=fifties consisted of about two hundred and fifty artists and a couple of dozen critics, curators, dealers, and collectors."
