Yellow is the cruelest color. Seemingly extroverted and gay, it expects to be treated like a prima donna, or it will go to pieces. It is too easily corrupted. The barest touch of black or graphite turns it dirty, grudging green. The eye can distinguish a million bright reds, greens, and purples, but only a narrow band of clear yellows. And if you juxtapose any one of them with the wrong neighbors, it will shrivel and shriek. Painting with yellow is like planning a dinner party around a schizophrenic — or around a man like Jackson Pollock, half charmer, half drunken lout.
Pollock reaches for yellow repeatedly, but usually — as in the monumental, magnificent Blue Poles (1952) — his yellow comes out grim and soiled, subtracting and not adding serenity and brightness, reminding us of corruption. Reminding us that Pollock’s is a grim story: His best paintings are tragedies that leave a person shaken.
The Pollock retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through February 2, is one of this decade’s important shows. Pollock’s well-known life story insinuates itself into every corner of the exhibit. You can’t forget as you look at this work that the artist died in 1956 at age forty-four, thrown from a heavy car that had jumped the road and was hurtling end-over-end. He was drunk; two girls were aboard, and one was killed along with him. The big car end-over-ending is a macabre precis of his whole career: His life’s work was the tracing of crazy lines with reckless force, in order to prove something unprovable to his women and himself. The wreck also summarizes the artist without his wife. Pollock had been relentlessly unfaithful to Lee Krasner, who had added discipline and purpose just sufficient to make his life cohere. Once she was gone, he was through.
Pollock is famous for his drip paintings, which date from 1947 through 1950 with a few encores afterward. Instead of touching a brush to stretched canvas, the artist pours, spatters, flings, and drips paint onto canvas unrolled on his studio floor. Lavender Mist (1950) is neither lavender nor mist, but is one of the greatest of this series. Lacy lines whip around in a tangle of white and black and silver and pink; the whole large painting (roughly seven feet by ten) is full of restless motion, but there is nothing frantic about it: It is all murmurs and whispers — the rose arbor alive with hidden bees, turned to silver; an image of great delicacy and restraint. (I overheard a lady at the exhibition tell her friend that it was “exquisite.” Pollock’s response would have been obscene. Nonetheless, it is exquisite.)
The pink in this painting is a pale peach-gray, nowhere near lavender. Clement Greenberg, critic and Pollock booster, came up with the name — presumably because the pink plus silver plus traces of blue in the black lines and gray-teal splotches yield a lavender feeling (sort of) when you look from the distance. “Mist” suggests transparency, but Pollock’s color is — here, as nearly always — opaque. Where different colors intersect, the result is marbling sometimes, but one color almost never tints or glazes another.
Lavender Mist is arresting and lovely, and poses the key Pollock question. He once asked his wife, referring to one of the drip pictures, “Is this a painting?” She took this as wondrous and remarkable, for her husband was obviously creating not merely paintings but great and revolutionary ones. Yet the question is serious. Looking at Lavender Mist, you wonder whether it is a painting or rather a kind of vamping on canvas — a prologue that forces attention toward an absent, unavailable climax, an interesting (even mesmerizing) figure that the band plays repeatedly while you wait for the song to start. The question is not whether, as a few hostile critics said at the time, Pollock was a mere fabric designer, or a maker of chic backgrounds for fashion shoots. There is no question of Lavender Mist’s being merely decorative and trivial. There is a question of its being incomplete — pointing to an artistic destination instead of being one, posting a question and refusing to answer.
But what is the answer? If Lavender Mist is the background, where is the foreground? Blue Poles, the delayed culmination of the drip series, answers at last. There is nothing murmurous or elegant in this picture. It is a hot, hissing mass of live wires, broken and writhing — vermilion and silver and black, dirty yellow, dirty white. But the painting has a foreground also: eight staggering, drunken slashes, the “blue poles” of the title. They emerge thrashing and dripping from the background.
The huge canvas was the result of a famous nighttime, nightmare visit. Pollock’s friend and fellow-artist Tony Smith drove many hours through a rainstorm to the far end of Long Island to calm the drunken master, who had a knife and was ragging. Smith proposed that they make a painting. The non-Pollock contributions (Barnett Newman may have worked on the canvas, too) eventually disappeared beneath the surface of Pollock’s last major drip work.
Blue Poles is probably Pollock’s greatest painting; it is the only drip painting that feels complete. Inevitably, the viewer reads those reeling, suffering, staggering blue poles as Pollock’s self-portrait. Serious artists are nearly always driven to portray themselves, but Pollock lacked the technique to make convincing portraits in the conventional sense. He was a fair-to-lousy draftsman. More important, he lacked the character to look himself in the eye. (Kirk Varnedoe notes in his fine catalogue essay that, in a rare and fragmentary self-portrait in an early notebook, the subject glances furtively to one side.)
Instead of confronting his technical limitations, Pollock slipped around and outwitted them. This artist whose weakness was poor draftsmanship insisted; nonetheless, on building his masterpieces exclusively out of lines. But these were lines of a new kind, airborne tangles of paint requiring a new kind of technique. In the end, he even figured out how to portray himself using these strange new lines he had invented.
The catalogue for an ordinary exhibition puts a painting on the cover. But this show’s catalogue uses instead a photograph of Pollock at work, a still from the famous documentary film by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg. Pollock is painting on glass. And we see, through the glass, Pollock’s face, brush, and writhing black line — his leitmotiv. Why did the photograph displace the painting we expected? Is it simply a better image than any Pollock painting? Tightly structured as it is, and centering on Pollock’s rapt and suffering face?
No. Pollock’s own paintings are better, deeper images. But the cover photo reminds us of the missing ingredient we sense in nearly all the artist’s work — the self-portrait that should have been included, that the artist did not know how to make until nearly the end. He was always painting backdrops for himself. The cover photo is a commentary on the way we look at these paintings. We project onto them the artist’s famous, brooding, omnipresent cultural icon of a face — and then they seem complete.
The drip paintings are conventionally described as “all-over” pictures, but there is no such thing. An all-over painting allegedly has no plot or center of attention. The painter merely bakes a certain texture and carves out a rectangular piece of it. But paintings are not lasagna, and human nature makes all-over paintings impossible. We can’t look all over, we can only look at.
Presenting the viewer with an allover painting is like showing him a Rorschach ink blot and telling him, “This is just an ink blot.” The eye discovers a plot in every painting — aside from the implied dark shadow of Pollock himself. In Number 3 (1948), the plot centers on thick ropes of aluminum, writhing like out-of-control firehoses; beneath them, gray-teal and rust-yellow collect in pools and spatters, and brown streams swirl into dirty-orange rivers. Number 27 (also 1950) is a view through the windshield as you drive through a silver-white-pink-yellow storm of shattering force, a storm to end the world, yet wholly silent, with mysterious pale-gray shapes dancing in the foreground.
During the hugely creative years between 1948 and 1950, Pollock barely drank. When he got back to alcohol, his productivity collapsed. But he did not lose his artistic way. Several of the late paintings are masterpieces. Some (such as White Light from 1954) look backward to the wriggling, densely painted networks of the years immediately preceding the Drip Age. Some are altogether new. The Deep (1953) is one of Abstract Expressionism’s great achievements — histrionic, but Pollock is always histrionic; strobefrozen electricity arcing a blood-black cosmic waste. The painting is tense with fright. It is often compared to Clyfford Still’s work; Still, too, uses ragged black voids, but his pictures are shallow, labored, and homely. The Deep is vibrant.
The show also includes some wonderful pre-drip works. In the celebrated but rarely seen Mural (1943), an abstract, frantic chorus line crowds the picture plane. (There is a lot of dance in Pollock’s work.) An untitled drawing from 1945 is worth the price of admission: a curvy, blotted-and-squirming Kandinsky line snake dancing in the background, straight-and-narrow planks laid across the front, mysterious faces lurking in the distance. The colors are lovely: pale gray-teal and (as usual) dirty yellow warmed up by gentle orange and vermilion.
The Museum of Modern Art has mounted has mounted a spectacular exhibition. But the press release makes arguable claims. It reports (predictably) that Pollock was “championed by art critics and mocked by the popular press.” He was also mocked by art critics and championed by the popular press, but that version fits establishment preconceptions less handily. As Varnedoe reports in his essay, Life magazine published a story in 1949 — “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” — that made Pollock famous. The text was partly pro-, partly anti-Pollock. But to read it in 1998 is to be astonished at its very existence. No pop-culture outlet of comparable importance would even consider a move like this today.
The press release claims that “psychological and medical problems” plagued him — which is simultaneously true and an evasion of the truth. When he started making money at last, he stiffed the brothers who had cared for him during the long, hard years of drunken struggle. He would have been lost without his wife, would probably have amounted to nothing; but he was mean and unfaithful to her. In his drunk-driver role, he was not only a suicide but a killer. These are not psychological problems, they are character flaws. He was a weak and selfish man. Also sick; also great. But to sweep his weak selfishness under the psychological-problems rug is to re-enact the ancient tradition of whitewashing great men’s lives.
When the museum’s press release calls him “the most influential American painter of the twentieth century,” it’s doing better. This is true, for now. The show confirms that Pollock (with Rothko and de Kooning) is part of the big three of Abstract Expressionism. Yet de Kooning is incomparably the greater painter and will prove more influential in the end.
Like de Kooning, like all great artists, Pollock was a mirror of his times. He came to adulthood during the Depression, and his colors tended towards a worn-out, Depression shabbiness all his life. Lavender Mist notwithstanding, every one of his drip paintings has urgent violence somewhere in it. But as a group, they speak also of the giddy expansion of cultural possibilities in America after World War II — of the yawning vacuum that brought forth with a great whoosh all sorts of art and ideas. We don’t understand Abstract Expressionism because we don’t understand America’s two brilliant postwar decades. The big-boldness of Abstract Expressionism was no protest against, it was a characteristic part of the postwar United States.
One final thing the museum’s press release neglects to report is a truth that many viewers will have in mind as they emerge — that Pollock’s is above all masculine art, art of physical force, of the painter’s will hitting canvas with uncompromising kamikaze power. It is not pretty, but (unlike today’s fashionable art) it is not ironic, snide, or patronizing either. Mainly, it is desperate. Hordes of men are desperate, after all — to prove something to women, or to say how they feel and what they want, or simply to announce who they are. Very few ever manage to put their desperation into paint.
Nowadays we have chased masculine art into exile, and we laugh at its futility and bumbling earnestness and inarticulate despair. But male artists (because they can’t help it) still turn the stuff out — on the low-rent cultural fringes, in the spiritual counter-parts of the dingy Greenwich Village walk-ups that the Abstract Expressionists inhabited before they struck gold and moved to the suburbs. Pollock inspires these exiled male artists, and hardship is good for them, and some day they will come down from the hills. In the meantime, why not visit Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art, where you can see the wave of the past and the wave of the future simultaneously?
Contributing editor David Gelernter is art critic for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
