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WD_281/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0281 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
A review of Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith -
Product Details;
* Hardcover: 934 pages
* Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1st edition (December 24, 1989)
* Language: English
Perhaps the work of Jackson Pollock the great American dripper raises that question as often as that of any. Unfortunately for all its nearly eight hundred pages, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's biography - Jackson Pollock: an American Saga - never really answers that question. It details the Surrealist interest in automatic art as explicated for Pollock by John Graham who saw in line straight from the unconscious of the artist, free from arbitrary conventions, rules and ideas, as the most honest form of art.
Reviewed by Jack Goodstein;
In "Art," Yesmina Reza's comic take on what often passes for significance in the world of modern visual art, a man's proud display of his newest purchase--a large canvas painted completely white--becomes the catalyst for a debate that has surfaced over and over again from Picasso and Miro to Lichtenstein and Warhol. How can these scribblings, these soup cans, these blotches and scratches that any three year old with a set of finger paints could produce: how can these things be considered great art?
Perhaps the work of Jackson Pollock the great American dripper raises that question as often as that of any. Unfortunately for all its nearly eight hundred pages, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's biography - Jackson Pollock: an American Saga - never really answers that question. It details the Surrealist interest in automatic art as explicated for Pollock by John Graham who saw in line straight from the unconscious of the artist, free from arbitrary conventions, rules and ideas, as the most honest form of art. Tapping into the artist's unconscious taps into the collective unconscious as well. Trouble is this would be true of the dauber as well.
It summarizes at length the ideas of Clement Greenberg, the art critic the authors feel was most responsible for nurturing and growing Pollock's reputation, but even as it does so, it makes very clear that Greenberg's thought is more subjective pronouncement than coherent aesthetic theory.
Greenberg saw in Pollock the avatar of his notion that representational painting violated the essential truth of the canvas. It was mere reproduction. Creativity demanded that the artist respect the "flatness" of the surface by not trying to make of it something it was not. Abstraction, without a referent in the figurative, justifies itself. It does not mean; it is, to paraphrase the poet. What makes a painting great is the use of color, the relationships between the colors on the canvas.
The trouble with this is there remains the question: what makes one use of color great art and another garbage? Greenberg would look at a painting and declare, "That works." He'd look at another and say that one didn't. Why one did and one didn't never quite seemed to get articulated.
Later Naifeh and Smith summarize Harold Rosenberg's commentary on "action painting," a term Pollock claimed Rosenberg had stolen from him, which asserted that the modern artist looked at a canvas not as a surface upon which something was to be expressed or reproduced, but as a vehicle for an event. Like Greenberg, however, Rosenberg doesn't seem to articulate a coherent rationale for why one event on canvas is art and another mere decoration.
Indeed, such a rationale never really seems to get articulated by Naifeh and Smith either, and this is truly unfair, since for most readers unfamiliar with modern art and its theories, it may well be the one thing needful.
What the biography does give is a portrait of the artist pursued by demons beyond his control, driven to alcohol and self destructive behavior, finding solace only rarely in his work and his relations with others.
Born the youngest of five brothers to a strong willed woman who managed to drive his father out of the house, he was a child who never seemed to get what he needed from his family. He seems to have turned to drawing as much because his oldest brother was an aspiring artist as for any other reason. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately as it was to turn out, he wasn't very good at drawing, and for all his studying and trying, he was never very good at it. A cynic might well opine that the impetus for his abstract expressionism was his technical ineptitude. One would like to think that an artist rejects technique once having mastered it because he finds it too limiting, too facile, too stale. Picasso, for example, was an excellent draughtsman, but sought for something beyond technical excellence. For Pollock, this does not seem to have been the case.
Perhaps this is part of the reason for Pollock's failure to take solace in his success. There would always be the gnawing suspicion that those who only saw the scribbling, those who considered him and those of his ilk charlatans, might well be right. Psychological problems, alcoholism--artistic success was not enough to save an artist possessed.
One remembers the opening of the motion picture "Pollock" which was based on this book where Ed Harris as the artist is standing alone at his show looking withdrawn and uncomfortable, a man who it seems can't wait to get out of there and find himself a drink. It is an apt image for the man portrayed in this biography.
Pollock's image of himself was the "man from the west," macho, virile, rowdy--the cowboy. And if this wasn't the real man, it was the face he tried to show the world: overturning tables at dinner parties, fighting in bars, grabbing at women at parties. What he really needed was someone to watch over him and tend to his needs: a replacement for his mother. Eventually he found her in Lee Krasner, a woman and painter who was willing to annihilate herself to care for him.
It is a large book and while Pollock is at its center, it also devotes a good deal of space to those around him. There are lengthy biographical accounts not only of Pollock's ancestors and Lee Krasner, but of his friend and teacher Thomas Hart Benton, as well as sketches of people like Greenberg, Graham and Peggy Guggenheim, who first showed Pollock's work, and a myriad of other friends and acquaintances. There are times when the reader wonders how much of his is really necessary. How much do we have to know about the background of a doctor who treated Pollock's alcoholism?
On the other hand there is a good deal of interesting material on the art scene in New York in the thirties and forties: Surrealist emigrees playing party games and feeling smugly superior to the American artists; Franz Kline and Pollock wrestling and drinking their way through Greenwich Village bars; Benton and his students getting together for musical concerts. There is great insight into the jealousy and back biting rampant even among the best of artists. There are compelling studies of the vagaries of critics and their capacity to make and break artists.
But when all is said and done, this reader is still left wondering what is it that makes the drippings of Jackson Pollock art and the drippings on the dropcloth covering the floor while painting the cupboard garbage.
-www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name
=News&file=article&sid=397
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