Jackson Pollock
was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was also called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. In 2016, Pollock's painting titled Number 17A was reported to have fetched US&20 million in a private purchase.
A reclusive and volatile personality, Pollock struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related single-car accident when he was driving. In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honoured with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.
Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. He later used paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases of the early 1940s, such as Male and Female and Composition with Pouring I. After his move to Springs, New York, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor and he developed what was later called his "drip" technique.
From 1938 to 1942 Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project. During this time Pollock was trying to deal with his established alcoholism; from 1938 through 1941 he underwent Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Joseph L. Henderson and later with Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo in 1941-42. Henderson engaged him through his art, encouraging Pollock to make drawings. Jungian concepts and archetypes were expressed in his paintings. Some historians have hypothesized that Pollock might have had bipolar disorder. Pollock signed a gallery contract with Peggy Guggenheim in July 1943. He received the commission to create the 2.4 by 6.1 m Mural (1943) for the entry to her new townhouse.
At the suggestion of her friend and advisor Marcel Duchamp, Pollock painted the work on canvas, rather than the wall, so that it would be portable. After seeing the big mural, the art critic Clement Greenberg wrote: "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,' and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced." The catalog introducing his first exhibition described Pollock's talent as:
"volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills out of itself in a mineral prodigality, not yet crystallized. "
Pollock's most famous paintings were made during the "drip period" between 1947 and 1950. He became famous following an August 8, 1949, four-page spread in Life magazine that asked, "Is he the greatest painter in the United States?" Thanks to the mediation of Alfonso Ossorio, a close friend of Pollock and the art historian Michel Tapié, the young gallery owner Paul Facchetti, from March 7, 1952, managed to realise the first exhibition of Pollock's works from 1948 to 1951 in his Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris and in Europe. At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style.
Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases. These paintings have been referred to as his "Black Pourings" and when he exhibited them at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, none of them sold. Parsons later sold one to a friend at half the price. These works show Pollock attempting to find a balance between abstraction and depictions of the figure.
He later returned to using colour and continued with figurative elements. During this period, Pollock had moved to the Sidney Janis Gallery, a more commercial gallery; the demand for his work from collectors was great. In response to this pressure, along with personal frustration, his alcoholism deepened.
Influence and Technique
The work of Thomas Hart Benton, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró influenced Pollock. Pollock started using synthetic resin-based paints called alkyd enamels, which at that time was a novel medium. Pollock described this use of household paints, instead of artists paints, as "a natural growth out of a need". He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting. With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, the paint now literally flowing from his chosen tool onto the canvas. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions.
In 1956, Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper" due to his painting style.
My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.
I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.
When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
- Jackson Pollock, My Painting, 1956
In 1950, Hans Namuth, a young photographer, wanted to take pictures -both stills and moving- of Pollock at work. Pollock promised to start a new painting especially for the photographic session, but when Namuth arrived, Pollock apologized and told him the painting was finished.
Namuth said that when he entered the studio:
A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor ... There was complete silence ... Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realised the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust coloured paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter ... My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half and hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said "This is it."
... Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas.
From naming to numbering
Continuing to evade the viewer's search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and started numbering his works. He said about this,
"Look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for. "
His wife said, "He used to give his pictures conventional titles ... but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is - pure painting. "
Critical debate
The Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization to promote American culture and values, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sponsored exhibitions of Pollock's work. Some left-wing scholars, including Eva Cockcroft, have argued that the United States government and wealthy elite embraced Pollock and abstract expressionism to place the United States in the forefront of global art and devalue socialist realism. Cockcroft wrote that Pollock became a "weapon of the Cold War".
Pollock described his art as,
"motion made visible memories, arrested in space".
In Pop-culture and Media
In 1960, Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz: A collective Improvisation featured a Pollock painting, The White Light as its cover artwork.
Art Market
In 1973, Number 11, 1952 was purchased by the Australian Whitlam government for the NAtional Gallery of Australia for US$2 million. At the time, this was the highest price ever paid for a modern painting. The painting is now one of the most popular exhibits in the gallery. It was a centerpiece of the museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective in New York, the first time the painting had been shown in America since its purchase.
In November 2006, Pollock's No.5, 1948 became the world's most expensive painting, when it was sold privately to an undisclosed buyer for the sum of US$140 million. Another artist record was established in 2004, when No. 12(1949), a medium-sized drip painting that had been shown in the United States Pavilion at the 1950 Venice Biennale, fetched US$11.7million at Christie's, New York. In 2012, Number 28, 1951, one of the artist's combinations of drip and brushwork in shades of silvery gray with red, yellow, and shots of blue and white, also sold at Christie's, New York, for US$20.5million - US$23 million with fees - within its estimated range of US$20 million to US$30 million.
In 2013, Pollock's Number 19 (1948) was sold by Christie's for a reported US$58,363,750 during an auction that ultimately reached US$495 million total sales in one night, which Christie's reports as a record to date as the most expensive auction of contemporary art.
In February 2016, Bloomberg News reported that Kenneth C. Griffin had purchased Jackson Pollock's 1948 painting Number 17A for US$200 million, from David Geffen.
Authenticity issues
In 2006, a documentary, Who the *$&% Is Jackson Pollock? was made concerning Teri Horton, a truck driver who bought an abstract painting for five dollars at a thrift store in California in 1992. This work may be a lost Pollock painting, but its authenticity is debated.
Untitled 1950, which the New York-based Knoedler Gallery had sold in 2007 for US$17 million to Pierre Lagrange, a London gedge-fund multimillionaire, was subject to an authenticity suit before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Done in the painter's classic drip-and-splash style and signed "J. Pollock", the modest-sized painting (15 by 28 1/2 in) was found to contain yellow paint pigments not commercially available until about 1970. The suit was settled in a confidential agreement in 2012.
Comments
Post a Comment