The Persistence of Pollock
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THE PERSISTENCE OF POLLOCK 3 May – 28 July 2012 Bobbi Coller and Helen A. Harrison Co-Curators The Persistence of Pollock From our vantage point at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it’s hard to imagine the pictorial landscape before Pollock. There was, of course, Picasso, whose dazzling and protean presence Pollock admired and envied, but from whom he tried to differentiate himself. But when Pollock first started to exhibit his singular and revolutionary poured paintings, he caused an earthquake that shattered the syntax of visual language, destabilized fundamental expectations of how a painting should be made, and liberated future generations of artists. Something about Pollock transcends the confines of painting. His art and persona have inspired numerous creative responses in many forms: musical compositions, poems, novels, choreography, performance art, a superb film with Ed Harris, and a one-act play by his friend B.H. Friedman. His immediately identifiable poured-paint look has been easily adapted for everyday products, including textiles, wallpaper, and pottery. Pollock has become part of culture, a symbol, and a point of reference. After his death, Pollock’s widow, the artist Lee Krasner, tried to correct many inaccurate myths that grew up around him, but sometimes truth is less powerful than mythology. For artists, the idea of Pollock has become as open and multilayered as an abstract painting. This exhibition, “The Persistence of Pollock,” assembles thirteen works in a variety of media that reflect Pollock’s powerful impact and attest to his continuing relevance for contemporary artists. They represent each of the decades of the sixty years since Pollock’s death in 1956. Some of the artists express admiration, some introduce humor, some rebel against a patriarch; some challenge the artist’s machismo by introducing a feminist perspective, while others incorporate non- western traditions and use Pollock’s work as a springboard for further innovation. Several reference the iconic photographs of Pollock at work taken by Hans Namuth during the summer of 1950. At first dismissed by the great photographer Edward Steichen, who advised Namuth, “this is not the way to photograph an artist,”1 the powerful images helped to create and sustain a legend. This exhibition, held on the hundredth anniversary of Pollock’s birth, offers the opportunity to consider and marvel at the endurance of that legend. Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) In addition to being a fellow artist who greatly appreciated Pollock’s work, Alfonso Ossorio was a close friend, a Hamptons neighbor, and a loyal patron. Born in Manilla, The Philippines, into a family who derived their wealth from sugar refining, he attended secondary school in England and the United States before graduating from Harvard in 1938 with a degree in Fine Art. Ossorio’s early work was influenced by Surrealism, but in 1949 he saw Pollock’s Number 5, 1948 at the Betty Parsons Gallery and immediately purchased it. He later described his first reaction to Pollock, saying: Here I saw a man who had broken all the traditions of the past and unified them, who had gone beyond cubism, beyond Picasso and Surrealism, beyond everything that had happened in art…his work expressed both action and contemplation.”2 When Number 5, 1948 arrived at Ossorio’s home, he noticed that it was damaged. Pollock offered to repair it, so Ossorio and his partner, the dancer Ted Dragon, drove with the painting to Springs. That meeting initiated the warm friendship that grew between Pollock and Krasner and Ossorio and Dragon. It also introduced the city dwellers Ossorio and Dragon to the East End, where they decided to rent a place for the summer of 1949. Two years later, it was Jackson and Lee who recommended that Ossorio purchase the seventy-acre estate on Georgica Pond known as The Creeks, which Ossorio and Dragon made their home for the next 40 years. Also in 1951, Ossorio wrote the catalogue introduction to Pollock’s solo exhibition of black paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and arranged for them to be exhibited in Paris the following year. As a result of his exposure to Pollock’s distinctive painting process, Ossorio experimented with a freer, allover style and even made poured works with thick accumulations of pigment. But beyond artistic admiration, Ossorio helped Pollock financially by buying work and sending monthly payments in anticipation of future purchases. Such an arrangement must have gone a long way to alleviate the couple’s monetary anxieties. After Pollock’s fatal car crash, Ossorio made a series of memorial works in homage to his friend and kindred spirit. Alfonso Ossorio, Untitled, mid 1950s. Oil on Masonite, 22 ¼ x 22 ¼ inches. Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. Gift of the Ossorio Foundation Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) Perhaps the most unexpected tribute to Pollock came in 1962 in the form of a now famous magazine cover, The Connoisseur, by the brilliant illustrator Norman Rockwell. Only six years after Pollock’s death, Rockwell produced a visual metaphor of the establishment confronting the avant-garde, controlled propriety facing expanding energy, and buttoned-up grey and white contrasted with exploding color. In one inspired image, the master of realist illustration engages in a dialogue with the master of mid-century abstraction. Norman Rockwell, study for The Connoisseur, 1961. Oil on canvas board, 14 x 24 ½ inches Lent by American Illustrators Gallery, New York Rockwell’s painstaking efforts to achieve the look of a Pollock abstraction were even more remarkable than the finished composition. For each Saturday Evening Post assignment, he routinely created many studies, and transformed his environment acccordingly. For this cover, his usually tidy studio became a temporary abstract expressionist workplace, similar to Pollock’s studio, where he made a series of studies for the “action painting” portion of the image. Numerous photographs document the process, and several are uncannily reminiscent of Hans Namuth’s photographs of Pollock leaning over his work. Process photos for The Connoisseur (cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1962) Photographs by Louie Lamone, 1961, courtesy Norman Rockwell Museum Collections Part of The Connoisseur’s charm is that the viewer cannot see the spectator’s reaction. If the dapper gentleman is a surrogate for Rockwell, it must have been approving, for in the same year that he painted this illustration, Rockwell was asked to reflect on his career choice. He replied, “If I were young and starting out again I would try to be an abstract artist. But at the time I started in art, almost 50 years ago, illustration was an exciting thing. I was very lucky to be able to do the thing I liked most.”3 Rockwell seems to have enjoyed the foray into abstraction that The Connoisseur cover offered, and he played with the result. He entered the trial study illustrated above in an art competition at the Berkshire Museum, but rather than use his real name, he signed the canvas Percival (a variant of his middle name, Percevel), thus protecting his reputation as a realist illustrator. He won Honorable Mention. Lee Ufan (born 1936) Pollock had a reciprocal relationship with Asian art. He was attracted to the expressive and controlled flow of line, the effect of dark color bleeding into absorbent surfaces, and the singular shape of long scrolls. Throughout the 1940s, Pollock regularly attended exhibitions of paintings by Mark Tobey—whose work was strongly influenced by Chinese calligraphy—at the Willard Gallery in New York. And in Japan, a group of experimental artists who called themselves the Gutai Art Association, founded in 1954, greatly admired Pollock after seeing examples of his work in a 1951 exhibition. Five years later, representatives of Gutai sent Pollock a letter and copies of their magazine, which promoted the concept of “concrete art,” in which “the human spirit and matter [materials] shake hands with each other.”4 Although there is no evidence that Pollock responded, the magazines remain in his library. The Korean-born artist Lee Ufan moved to Japan in 1956, the year Pollock died. During the next decade, Lee led a movement known as Mono-ha (literally “school of things”), similar to Gutai in its response to the shifting social and political culture of post-war Japan. He concentrated his efforts on sculpture based on the relationship among natural and industrial materials and the space around them. In addition to sculpture, large-scale installations, and metaphysical writings, Lee produced a body of abstract paintings and watercolors that pulse with allusions to time and nature through repetitive gestural marks that draw attention to the meeting of pigment and surface. Lee Ufan’s Pushed-Up Ink shows Pollock’s far-reaching influence. Informed by Pollock’s experiments with ink on Japanese paper, Lee soaked his brush with animal skin glue mixed with the ink and repeatedly pressed it against absorbent paper until the liquid material bled through, often creating holes in the process. Like Pollock, Lee’s action in making the work creates a rhythm that is both intoxicating and expansive. Lee Ufan, Pushed-Up Ink, 1964. Ink on Japanese paper, 27 ½ x 21 ¾ inches. Private collection Lynda Benglis (born 1941) In 1974, Lynda Benglis posed nude holding a strategically-placed dildo for a shocking and controversial advertisement in Artforum magazine. But even before that groundbreaking photo, she had been challenging the gendered associations attributed to art movements and styles, overturning long-standing expectations. After having boldly employed the physically demanding pouring technique so associated with Pollock, as well as the active gestures of male Abstract Expressionists, Benglis was featured in a 1970 Life Magazine article entitled “Fling, Dribble and Dip.” The article made clear the connection between Benglis and Pollock by including one of Namuth’s 1950 photos of Pollock in his studio alongside working shots of Benglis.