How “Unprecedented” Is Jackson Pollock
Either you are a fan of Pollock, or indifferent to his oeuvre, whenever you encounter his recognisable painting you might have thought how reckless is his attitude to a paint, a canvas, history of preceding art, in the end.
Devising a radically new innovation, redefining the categories of painting and drawing, developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art—these are characteristics awarded to Pollock by art connoisseurs. In fact, they are all reliable and proceed from the modern reaction on Pollock’s legacy. In reality, as every artist since prehistory, Pollock has gone through his own artistic development filled with influences, enthusiasm with particular movements, and style elaboration. Below is a brief unfolding of 1930-40’s decade with the main art scene’s players.
It all started from muralism and one of this movement’s proponent, José Clemente Orozco. In 1930 he painted a fresco in Pomona College, Claremont, with cues from El Greco and his elongated figures and pronounced expressionism.
Pollock:
Orozco also executed a series of murals “Epic of American Civilization” in the library of Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. The following one depicts a dead woman giving birth to a dead child in the presence of dead doctor—the artist’s critisizing metaphor of modern education and a college for “white reach people”.
Pollock later reflected:
And more later: (can you see the skeleton’s contour)?
But Orozco’s panels were not the only subject of that time’s context. Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism have emerged and suggested ways of new artistic methods. This work by Arshile Gorky, Armenian-American expressionist, can be described as Kandinsky’s interpretation filtered through surrealism, with more articulated biomorphic shapes.
In 1943 Pollock was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim, to create a work for entry in her new townhoue. Pollock responded with Mural, partly following the assigned place’s format, partly the abstract, expressionist vigor. Mural was immediately recognized as a breakthrough and a turning point for American art.
From Mural to Arabesque: eventually Pollock reaches a “drip” painting, which later has become synonymous with his name. The fundamentally new idea is the role of the line, that does not have to be a slave of the painting anymore. Pollock freed the line from centuries-old seclusion.
Around this time Pollock stopped giving his paintings evocative titles and began instead to number them. His wife, artist Lee Krasner, later explained:
Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a painting for what it is pure painting.
Collectors did not immediately appreciate Pollock’s radical new style, and when first exhibited, in 1949, this painting remained unsold. Later that year the work was shown again in the artist’s second solo exhibition and shortly thereafter was purchased by MoMA.
