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Using this Site
This digital resource is designed to provide students with a collection
of images for courses offered by the Department of Art History and
Archaeology. As with many subjects in the history of art and architecture,
issues of attribution, chronology, subject matter and condition continue
to be discussed and debated among scholars. Although we have made
every effort to use reliable sources of information, students should
approach this site with a critical eye and a questioning mind.
Images are available on the menu under Visual
Resources.
Working Methods and Technique.
Pollock is most famous for his pouring technique and for painting
his large canvases on the floor using heavily loaded brushes, sticks
and turkey-basters to disperse the paint. Analysis of Number 2, 1949
(9.68 x 4.81 m; Utica, NY, Munson-Williams-Proctor Inst.; see Abstract
expressionism, fig. 1) will clarify his methods. The surface consists
of poured lines and small drops of paint on commercially dyed dark
red fabric. The sequence of colours is as follows: thin grey and white
lines, a row of bold black curves, an overall intertwining of white
and finally delicate pourings and touches of yellow, silver, scarlet
and Indian red. Oil from the larger concentrations of black and white
paint bled into the porous fabric, creating shadow-like areas of a
darker red. Pollock exploited this by carefully placing drops of Indian
red paint, the same colour as the fabric, within these darker areas,
creating a repoussoir effect that gives a lively dimensionality to
what would otherwise have appeared a drab mistake. Pollock was not
arbitrarily ‘dripping’ paint but was concerned about,
and carefully controlling, his painterly effects, despite the implications
of the idea of Action painting. The first elements of the curvilinear
design can be traced on the reverse of Number 2, 1949 because it is
painted on fabric rather than canvas. Elements that soaked through
appear there as if white were under black but appear on the front
with the white on top, showing that Pollock filled in parts of the
white lines so the overall aesthetic balance of lights and darks would,
as he liked to say, ‘work’.
The vertical black elements of the composition all feel as if the
hand had applied them from left to right. Looking at the predominant
white elements, a certain tension is discernible. The problem posed
by visual instinct is solved by recognizing that the whites were mostly
set down from the other edge of the canvas. For Pollock, painting
on the floor like a North American Indian sand painter, it was a matter
of working along both of its long sides. When the painting is reversed
it is apparent that the whites flow as freely and logically as the
blacks. One of the hallmarks of most of Pollock’s large-scale
work is that the major design elements flow from left to right, as
if written out. The left edge of the work, whichever side Pollock
is working from, always begins with an elegant pirouette of paint,
which then dances across the length of the canvas, until it reaches
the terminal right edge, where a suddenly stymied form signifies the
artist’s frustration that subjective infinity is limited by
the objective length of his ground. In the case of Number 2, 1949,
after thinking through the overall coherence of its composition from
both sides, Pollock felt it ‘worked’ better if the tension
in the whites was retained against the freer blacks underneath. This
was typical of his way of thinking, akin to the wildness of nature.
The unusual shape of the work, about five times as wide as it is high,
served his tendency to ‘write out’ his paintings. Pollock
was also very interested during these years in painting murals, which
he did not do on the WPA/FAP. The row of vertical black curves across
the length of the work echoes Benton’s theories of mural design.
He taught artists to organize a wall with a series of verticals around
which more free-flowing forms could be arranged. Pollock often used
this device in his work, notably in Blue Poles, and he used it in
Number 2, 1949, countering the whites around the black uprights in
a way that sets the rhythms of his oblong frieze. This shape may go
even deeper into Pollock’s experience. A family photograph of
the dining-room at Cody in 1912, from the same group of photographs
that had influenced Going West, showed oblong oleolithographs of flowers
on the wall, the exact shape and overall look of many of his most
striking poured paintings.
The details of Pollock’s style and facture, whether in major
canvases or in his drawings and mixed-media works, all seem to derive
from limitations of education and experience. In many ways his work
was a closed system that re-assimilated itself until its energy dissipated.
Yet his paintings and personality have entered modern mythology by
virtue of a heroism of character that transcends both tradition and
tragedy.
Bibliiography from the Grove Dictionary of Art
F. O’Hara: Jackson Pollock (New York, 1959)
B. Robertson: Jackson Pollock (New York, 1960) [excellent pls]
W. Rubin: ‘Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition’,
Artforum, v (1967), no. 2, pp. 14–22; no. 3, pp. 28–37;
no. 4, pp. 18–31; no. 5, pp. 28–33
F. V. O’Connor: ‘The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912–1943’,
Artforum, v/5 (1967), pp. 16–23
Jackson Pollock (exh. cat. by F. V. O’Connor, New York, MOMA,
1967)
C. L. Wysuph: Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytical Drawings (New York,
1970)
B. H. Friedman: Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York, 1972)
F. V. O’Connor and E. V. Thaw, eds: Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue
Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, 4 vols (New
Haven, 1978)
A. Mag., 53 (1979) [issue devoted to Pollock]
W. Rubin: ‘Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological
Criticism’, A. Amer., lxvii (1979), no. 7, pp. 104–23;
no. 8, pp. 72–91 [responses in lxviii/8 (1980)]
Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings, 1951–1953 (exh. cat. by
F. V. O’Connor, Boston, MA, ICA, 1980)
Jackson Pollock: Drawings into Paintings (exh. cat. by B. Rose, New
York, MOMA, 1980)
Jackson Pollock (exh. cat. by D. Bozo and others, Paris, Pompidou,
1982) [excellent colour pls]
E. Frank: Jackson Pollock (New York, 1983) [summary of critical theories
about Pollock]
J. Potter: To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock
(New York, 1985)
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