Jackson Pollock : new approaches

Jackson Pollock : new approachesJackson Pollock : new approachesJackson Pollock : new approaches Edited by Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe KarmelEdited by Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel
Date 1999
Publisher The Museum of Modern Art: Distributed by H.N. Abrams
ISBN 0870700863, 0810962020
Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/226
The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history—from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists.
© 2017 The Museum of Modern ArtMoMA
Jackson Pollock
h<£ M0MJ\
by Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator, with Pepe Karmel, Adjunct Assistant
Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Mod
ern Art, New York, November 1,1998 to February 2, 1999.
The exhibition was made possible by Bank of America. Generous support
was provided by The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. The reconstruction of
Pollock's studio was made possible by EXOR America (Agnelli Group). The
Museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the Eugene V. and Clare E.
Thaw Charitable Trust and an anonymous donor. Additional funding was
provided by TDI. An indemnity for the exhibition was granted by the
Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. This publication is made
possible through the generosity of The David Geffen Foundation.
Produced by the Department of Publications, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York Edited by David Frankel Designed by Steven Schoenfelder,
New York Production by Christina Grillo Printed by Poligrafiche Bolis
SpA, Azzano San Paolo, Italy This book is set in Font Bureau Eagle and Adobe Stone Serif.
Copyright © 1999 The Museum of Modern Art, New York All works of
Jackson Pollock © 1999 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York Photographs by Hans Namuth, © 1999 Hans Namuth Ltd.
Certain illustrations are covered by claims to copyright cited in the Photo
graph Credits on p. 247. All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 99-076190 ISBN: 0-87070-
086-3 (MoMA, T&H) ISBN: 0-8109-6202-0 (Abrams)
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York,
New York 10019 Distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., New York Distributed outside the United States and Canada
by Thames & Hudson Ltd, London Printed in Italy
Cover: Jackson Pollock. Number 1A, 1948 (detail). 1948. Oil and enamel on
canvas, 68 in. x 8 ft. 8 in. (172.7 x 264.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Jackson Pollock
New Approaches
Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art
Ronald S. Lauder
Mrs. Patti Cadby Birch**
New York
8 Introduction: Pollock and The Museum of Modern Art
15 Pollock's Smallness T.J.Clark
71 A Sum of Destructions Pepe Karmel
101 No Chaos Damn It James Coddington
117 Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro
121 Plates
155 The Crisis of the Easel Picture Rosalind E. Krauss
181 Pollock's Nature, Frankenthaler's Culture Anne M. Wagner
201 Jackson Pollock and the Americanization of Europe Jeremy Lewison
233 Open-Ended Conclusions about Jackson Pollock Kirk Varnedoe
246 Index
248 Acknowledgments
Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmei
In the forty-odd years since Jackson Pollock's death, in 1956, several generations
of critics, historians, and artists have confirmed his importance in twentieth-
century art. All the while, though, these analysts and creators have been chang
ing our sense of why Pollock is such a crucial figure. The ongoing life of that
process, and the often passionate debates that today surround Pollock and his
legacy, are vividly evident in the nine essays that make up this book. Art histo
rian T. J. Clark focuses on issues of scale and size in Pollock's work, and links the
work's formal characteristics to new understandings of energy in the first era of
the atomic bomb. Robert Storr and Pepe Karmei, curators at The Museum of
Modern Art, rethink Pollock's origins and formation, Storr examining his often
slighted debts to Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Karmei shed
ding new light on the more celebrated confrontation with Pablo Picasso. Supported
by X rays of key paintings and a fresh investigation of Pollock's materials, con
servators James Coddington and Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro provide unprece
dented insight into the artist's working process, and belie popular notions of his
practices as chaotic. Art historian and critic Rosalind E. Krauss concentrates on
Pollock's legacy among artists of the 1960s and '70s, with an emphasis on the
implications of horizontality in his most radical paintings. Still within the arena
of Pollock's impact on subsequent art, but with a focus on issues of gender, art
historian Anne M.Wagner offers new thinking about Helen Frankenthaler's his
toric response to Pollock. The artist's ambivalent reception in Europe, amid a
broader debate about American culture and commerce, is newly documented
and analyzed by Jeremy Lewison of the Tate Gallery, London, while Kirk
Varnedoe, Chief Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of The
Museum of Modern Art, reconsiders the relationship between Pollock's biogra
phy and his development as an artist, and opposes the traditional assessment of "expressionism" in his art.
These essays were originally presented at a symposium held on January
23-24, 1999, at The Museum of Modern Art, near the conclusion of the Mus
eum's Pollock retrospective. From the outset, this symposium volume was con-
8
The David Ceffen Foundation.
KIRK VARNEDOE AND PEPE KARMEL
According to the critic Clement Greenberg, Pollock was among the first New
York artists to "discover" this work. Greenberg also said Pollock had told him that
the great 1944 painting Gothic was made under the influence of the Demoiselles.4
When Pollock began to exhibit, staff and patrons of the institution re
sponded to him actively. The jury for the 1943 Spring Salon at Peggy Guggen
heim's Art of This Century gallery included three Museum figures: Barr; the critic
and collector James Thrall Soby, then Chair of the Acquisitions Committee of
the Museum's Advisory Committee; and the critic and collector James Johnson
Sweeney, the Committee's Vice-Chair, and later the director of the Museum's
Department of Painting and Sculpture. Swayed by the advocacy of the painter
Piet Mondrian, who described the painting Pollock submitted as "the most inter
esting work I've seen so far in America," the jury voted to accept it.5 (Nearly forty
years later, this breakthrough canvas, Stenographic Figure, joined the Museum's
collection.) Soon thereafter, Guggenheim signed Pollock for her gallery, and that
November he became the first American to mount a solo exhibition there. When
that exhibition opened, it was Sweeney who wrote the brochure. Soby visited the
show, and put The She-Wolf on reserve, to be considered for acquisition by the
Museum's Advisory Committee.6 After some debate, the purchase (for $600) was
approved. This was the first of Pollock's works to be acquired by any museum.7
Barr seems not to have been fully persuaded by Pollock's work, and resisted
suggestions that the Museum acquire pictures from his later exhibitions at Art of
This Century.8 The Museum did, however, include Pollock's 1943 Mural in the
exhibition Large Scale Modern Paintings (1947), where it appeared alongside works
such as Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, Henri Matisse's 1916-17 Women at a
Spring, Fernand Leger's 1935-39 Composition with Two Parrots, and Max Beck-
mann's 1945 Blindman's Buff. The Museum's next acquisition occurred only after
a change in Pollock's style: in January 1950, it acquired Number 1A, 1948, be
coming the first institution to buy a work made by the pouring or "drip" method
that Pollock had initiated in 1947.9 The purchase was a milestone for Pollock and
his wife, Lee Krasner, helping them raise the money to install heating in their
Long Island home.10 Barr included this canvas (along with two other Pollocks) in
his selections for the XXV Venice Biennale in the summer of 1950.
In the interim, Guggenheim had closed Art of This Century and returned
to Europe, taking part of her collection with her and distributing the rest among
American museums and educational institutions. In 1952, she gave MoMA an
other splendid example of Pollock's poured style, Full Fathom Five, of 1947. In
April of that year, Pollock was featured in the 15 Americans exhibition at the
Museum," and in May 1956, he was selected to inaugurate a new series of exhi
bitions intended to feature artists in mid-career. That exhibition, sadly, would be
hastily transformed into a posthumous retrospective, after Pollock's death in a
car crash on August 11. Selected by Sam Hunter, then a MoMA curator, this show
10
ceived in tandem with the major publication that accompanied the exhibition:
Jackson Pollock, by Kirk Varnedoe with Pepe Karmel. That book's large-format
color illustrations of Pollock's work were intended to offer a comprehensive pic
torial overview of his development. Its introductory essays were written in the
understanding that the Museum would include more diverse scholarly voices,
and a fuller complement of bibliography and exhibition history, in subsequent
publications. This symposium volume is one of those publications, and its for-
mat in contrast to that of the earlier book—has been designed to emphasize
text. For this reason, and to keep this volume modestly priced, we have depended
on smaller illustrations, and ultimately on the reader's ability to refer to the pre
vious book for a more lavish visual documentation.1 Jackson Pollock: New Approaches
is accompanied by Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, a matching
volume that anthologizes important older texts by or about Pollock that have
become harder to find today. And finally the comprehensive Pollock bibliogra
phy and exhibition history compiled by the Museum's researchers has been
made available on the Museum's Website: http://www.moma.org.2
This broad program of publications reflects the Museum's long-standing
engagement with Pollock's work. Dating back to his early career, this engage
ment has taken the form of numerous acquisitions, exhibitions, and books—all
reflecting the belief that Pollock is one of the critical figures who has marked,
and continues to shape, the course of modern art. The Museum's great Pollock
paintings are as a rule on view, and certain landmark acquisitions and exhibi
tions are familiar to scholars. But the fuller history of the Museum's relation to
Pollock has been only imperfectly understood, and it seems appropriate to
review that history here.
As is well known, Pollock's formative years as an artist—his late twenties and
early thirties— were strongly affected by his visits to The Museum of Modern Art.
The landmark Picasso retrospective of 1939 organized by the Museum's found
ing director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., played a crucial role in awakening the young
Pollock to European modernism; Rene d'Harnoncourt's 1941 exhibition Indian
Art of the United States reinforced Pollock's interest in tribal art, and allowed him
to witness Native American artists "painting" a picture by pouring sand onto the
floor. The Museum's Joan Miro retrospective of 1943 offered in-depth exposure
to the other European artist (besides Picasso) Pollock said he most admired.
Pollock was especially affected by three Picasso paintings in the Museum's
collection. The first of these, Girl before a Mirror, entered the collection in 1938.
After Guernica was first exhibited in New York, in 1939, it was left on long-term
loan at the Museum, so Pollock was able to study it—and the violent prepara
tory drawings for it—at leisure. Picasso's seminal work of 1907, Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, was purchased by the Museum in 1937 and went on view in early 1939.3
9
KIRK VARNEDOE AND PEPE KARMEL
when the exhibition catalogue appeared, its chronology by Francis V. O'Connor
for the first time established a solid foundation for the study of Pollock's life.
It was also in 1967 that Rubin formally joined the Museum's curatorial
ranks. As one of his first endeavors, he suggested to Sidney and Harriet Janis that
they donate to the Museum their extraordinary collection —over 100 works—of
modern art. The Janises' gift included one small poured Pollock, Free Form of 1946,
and one late canvas, White Light (1954),17 but Rubin, more eager than ever for
the Museum to acquire one of the monumental works of 1950, had his sights set
higher: he persuaded a more-than-willing Sidney Janis to agree to sell up to four
of the eight Mondrians and Legers in his collection in order to finance the pur
chase for the Museum, in 1968, of One: Number 31, 1950 (which was owned, like
Blue Poles, by Heller). In the end, happily, two Mondrians more than sufficed.18
With this master stroke in 1968 as his starting salvo, Rubin then set out to
build a systematic representation of Pollock's career, in the context of a major
upgrading of its holdings in Abstract Expressionism. The small but telling tran
sitional canvas Shimmering Substance of 1946 was bought the same year, and
arguably the greatest of Pollock's 1951 black pourings, Echo (Number 25, 1951),
was purchased in 1969. In April of 1980, after a decade of negotiations with Kras-
ner, Rubin and the Museum announced that seven key paintings would be ac
quired from Pollock's estate. Four of these—The Flame (c. 1934-38), Mask (c. 1941),
Stenographic Figure (c. 1942), and There Were Seven in Eight (c. 1945)—were pur
chases; three —Circle (c. 1938-41), Bird (c. 1938-1941), and the key late picture
Easter and the Totem (1953)—were gifts from Krasner, in memory of Pollock.
Given first choice of the works remaining in the estate,19 Rubin had targeted
pictures that allowed the Museum to represent the whole of the artist's career,
virtually year by year, from his earliest mature ventures to his last resolved
efforts. As part of the same agreement, Krasner also made a promised gift of
Gothic, which eventually became the property of the Museum in 1984. When
Rubin retired as director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, in 1988,
he had been responsible for the arrival of thirteen Pollocks in the Museum. This
unrivaled collection provided the foundation on which the recent retrospective
was built.
This exhibition, and the books accompanying it, are thus the direct prod
uct of a prolonged and intense institutional engagement with Jackson Pollock.
The exhibition allowed the Museum to fulfill its historic role, not just as a repos
itory but as a resource for modern art. We were deeply gratified to see how many
young artists came here to confront Pollock, as Pollock himself had confronted
Picasso here sixty years before. We hope that these books will play a comparable
role in provoking creative work by scholars, critics, and artists.
12
introduction: pollock and the museum of modern art
opened in December 1956, barely four months after Pollock's death. The next
year, Frank O'Hara, a curator at the Museum as well as an influential poet,
selected a comprehensive Pollock exhibition to be sent to the Sao Paulo Bienal
under the auspices of the Museum's International Council.12 O'Hara's show then
toured to Rome, Basel, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, London, and Paris. The
exhibition exercised a decisive effect on European estimations of Pollock.
In the meantime, The Museum of Modern Art reached for and missed an
opportunity to acquire one of Pollock's monumental poured paintings of 1950.
In the first half of 1956, as the Museum prepared to mount its first Pollock ret
rospective, Barr asked Sidney Janis, then Pollock's dealer, to put a reserve on
Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950. Janis later recalled that the agreed-upon price
was $6,000, but Barr never exercised his option, and after Pollock's death Krasner
increased the price dramatically: in 1957, Janis told Barr the same painting would
cost $30,000. 11 Barr balked, and Autumn Rhythm was acquired instead by The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The need to acquire one of Pollock's large paint
ings remained evident, though; and another opportunity seemed to present
itself in 1958, when William Rubin, then a noted art history professor and col
lector, who would later join the Museum as curator of the collection, proposed
to buy Number 32, 1950 from the artist's estate, and make it a promised gift to
the Museum. Krasner had wanted the Museum to purchase Pollock's large Blue
Poles: Number 11, 1952, when its original owner had moved to sell it. (The even
tual purchaser was Ben Heller.) But she felt unable to devote much time to the
proposed sale of Number 32, since she was busy with an important commission.14
Negotiations extended well into January 1959. Rubin was willing to pay $35,000,
which would have been a record price for Pollock.15 He even devised a complex
arrangement by which he would have purchased Blue Poles from Heller, then
exchanged it with Krasner for Number 32.16 Nothing availed, and Rubin and the
Museum finally gave up hope. It would be almost a decade before Rubin and
Janis, playing dramatically different roles, finally solved the dilemma of acquir
ing a monumental Pollock for the Museum.
The year of 1967 was a crucial one for the crystallization of Pollock's stature
among postwar American artists, for the spread of his influence on younger
artists, and for his presence in the Museum's collection. In April, William Lieber-
man (then a MoMA curator) organized the most thorough retrospective until
then of Pollock's work. As Rosalind Krauss discusses elsewhere in this volume,
the exhibition helped inspire a radical shift in contemporary art toward an aes
thetic of horizontality and "anti-form." This was also a crucial year for Pollock
studies: even before the exhibition opened, Rubin began publishing "Jackson
Pollock and the Modern Tradition," a seminal series of articles in Artforum.
Among other things, Rubin's argument for the artist's roots in European mod
ernism forcefully refuted the myth of Pollock as a naive, "cowboy" artist. Then,
11
Notes
1. In order to keep this book to a modest size and price, we have had to omit the lively discussions that followed the original presentation of each paper. Audiotapes and tran scripts of these discussions may be consulted in the Museum Archives. 2. From the Museum's home page, go to "Research Resources," then to "DADABASE" (the Museum library), then to "Search the Catalog." Run a "Basic" search on "Pollock, Jack son." The bibliography should appear under its own heading in the "Results" screen. The procedure to follow may change over time, but the Museum will make every effort to ensure that the bibliography remains easily available. 3. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was ex hibited at the Jacques Seligmann gal lery, New York, in 1937, from which it was purchased by The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum, however, was constructing its 53rd Street build ing, and did not exhibit the painting until 1939. See Judith Cousins and Helene Seckel, "Chronology of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 to 1939," in William Rubin, Seckel, and Cousins, Studies in Modern Art 3: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994), pp. 196-202. 4. In 1981, Charles Cooper and Fran cis Frascina, who were making a film on the Demoiselles, told Cousins (then a researcher at the Museum) that in their interview with Clement Green- berg the critic had insisted that the Demoiselles had at first been less noticed by New York artists than Girl before a Mirror and Guernica. Greenberg had apparently insisted that Pollock was among the first to "discover" the painting, and that the evidence of this engagement was clearest in Gothic. Matthew Rohn told Cousins of a similar conversation in which, according to Greenberg, Pollock remarked that Gothic was painted "under the inspiration of the Demoiselles." Cousins, memo in the files of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, June 26, 1981. 5. See Jimmy Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life: A Memoir by Jimmy Ernst (New York: St. Martin's Press/Marek, 1984), pp. 241-42. 6. In a memo of November 9, 1943, to Agnes Rindge, a Vassar College art history professor and a member of the Acquisitions Committee, James Thrall Soby…