Jackson Pollock in Australia
Daniel Harrison refers us to a link to Jackson Pollock's
Blue Poles Number 11, in Australia and for which the Australian government paid $2 million (a long time ago) and says
"That is alot of money for someone to pour paint on a canvas. "
I've never seen
Blue Poles Number 11 but I do know that it's considered one of Pollock's best paintings and that Stanley Marsh, of Amarillo, Texas (who financed Robert Smithson's
Amarillo Ramp and was the "idea", if you will, behind the
Cadillac Ranch) sent a talented young Texan painter to Australia to copy it for his, Marsh's, "Dynamite Museum," a Museum of acknowledged forgeries of 50-some important American paintings.
Blue Poles Number 11 was the Pollock that Mr. Marsh wanted even though the young painter could have copied one of the great ones in the US for a small fraction of the cost of going to Australia and staying there the several months it took to complete the work.
However, I have seen many Jackson Pollock paintings from this same great period in his career -- and saw the Museum of Modern Art 1990s retrospective of Pollock's work -- and can tell you that Jackson Pollock never poured paint on a canvas in his life, not in the way I think Daniel Harrison implies, i.e.
just poured paint on canvas.
Every abstract Pollock canvas is highly intentional from edge to edge and corner to corner.
The tension between drawing and painting (in the black paintings) is about as high as tension can get in a painting and the release, in the composition, is equally strong.
With color the tension gets more complex and the release more satisfying.
For those two or three years Pollock painted like an angel, hardly earth bound and with an ease of execution that rivals some of the greatest painters in history.
In those paintings there is grace, strength, elegance, bluntness, there are flights of fancy, plunges toward the earth and soarings back up at the last minute, there is tenderness, comedy, pathos, drama, narrative, hubris, humility, rage -- all in one painting, painting after painting.
He transferred to painting the technique of the three-ring-circus finale: the great spectacle, and carried it to heights the circus has never achieved (outside of the finale of Fellini's
The Clowns). His paintings are, thus, presentational in the extreme.
In some paintings his visual counterpoint equals Bach's musical counterpoint. It also creates the same effect as Bach's, an architectural one. Bach's counterpoint (e.g.
The Art of the Fugue)soars like the interior of a great cathedral, Pollock's moves forward and inward in labaryinthine intricacy but both architectural spaces* are vast and complex and defy the human soul's comprehension of them. Contemplating both, one is only brushed by the wings of a soaring being whose imagination can grasp the infinite.
Even though Pollock sometimes literally poured paint directly from the can to the canvas, he never
just poured paint on canvas and in effect he never poured at all, not in the fifty or sixty pictures I saw at the Museum of Modern Art, not in a single one. In effect, he painted.
That he painted with a stirring stick, with raw paint from the can, with cigarette ash and cigarette buts, with coins and other debris from his pockets, with debris from the floor of his converted-barn studio doesn't change the situation.
By 1913 Picasso and Braque had abolished the hierarchy of materials: the notion that some materials (oil on canvas, marble, bronze, etc.) were "nobler" for making art than others.
At the same time, by gluing bits of newspaper into their paintings, they changed the meaning of the verb "to paint" and the noun "painting": these no longer exclusively meant the acts and products of a person with a paint brush, oil paints and canvas. Gluing things onto the canvas became part of painting. Artists have been pushing the boundaries back ever since.
Pollock pushed back the boundaries. But his importance is not in the fact that he painted in large part without brushes but in the fact that the work he created is good. Had it been bad he would have done nothing despite the novelty of his technique.
He painted.
By the time he painted those great abstract works he knew so much about how paint behaves that he could create whatever effects he wanted with it just by letting it drip off a stirring paddle or pour from a can in thin streams, in thick, in short bursts, in long pours, from high, from low, thrown or delicately dropped: he knew his materials inside out and all his instruments including brushes. He was a great technician, a great craftsman... He had to be in order to make those paintings as good as they are.
One can only see and, more importantly, feel all this if one stands in front of the original paintings and looks at them carefully, long and with at least as much intention as Pollock put into the painting of them. One cannot judge
Blue Poles Number 11 from a small scan of a photographic reproduction received by a computer from the Internet and seen on a monitor.
yrs
ben
www.benlifson.com
*Susanne K. Langer tells us that pictures create "virtual space" and argues her case convincingly.