Word: pollock
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...bright young proconsuls of the advance guard, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, added to this pattern of approach a breathtaking fervency and single-mindedness. Following Clausewitz' formula for successful military attack, they concentrated all the forces they could muster on the smallest possible problem: to express what they happened to be feeling in the process of painting. The results were huge canvases excitedly smeared, spattered, daubed, dribbled and gobbed with color in the shape of freewheeling overall designs, as if the artists had been playing with paints and got carried away. They were not as formless and unconsidered...
...Pollock-De Kooning breakthrough soon found a following, and a label: abstract expressionism. Like most labels, this one has proved inadequate. It is used loosely to suggest merely the expression of strong feeling without any reference to objective reality. Young idealists in search of an ideal, and middle-aged casuists in search of a cause, alike sprang to the defense of abstract expressionism almost before it began to be attacked. And it was attacked, inevitably, for to believers in the classical concepts of beauty and truth to nature, it was an insult. This gave the advance guard a stimulating sense...
...Daily Telegraph was concerned, the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell "bombinate in a void. Nothing is communicated beyond an apparently fortuitous anarchy of pigmentation." "An air of impermanence," said the Observer. The arch-conservative London Times conceded that the abstract-expressionist movement is the "one development in American art ... [that] has gained for the United States an influence upon European art which it has never exerted before." But as for the works themselves, the Times declared: "The large, uncompromising canvases . . . have a monumental impermanence, show a defiance of Art and a kind of strange anonymity...
...sacrifice of reality to demands of equilibrium and now worked exploring the possibilities of combining forms, in "jesting grotesque." Never completely satisfied with tightness of silhouettes he sporadically tried his hand at the rough shaky line and nervous application of color. This departure similar to the ramblings of Jackson Pollock show up in some of his etchings done in 1953, which surrender more than usually to spontaneity in design. His oils continue to reflect the relaxation of right geometric form. There is a decreasing interest in orchestrating multiples of small details in favor of larger more comprehensive rhythms...
...York Times regretted that "until psychology digs deeper into the workings of the creative act, the spectator can only respond, in one way or another, to the gruff, turgid, sporadically vital reelings and writhings of Pollock's inner-directed art." ¶ The New York Herald Tribune stated firmly that "whether or not you like Pollock's painting, or think the results no better than color decorations, one must admit the potency of his process." ¶ Art News explained that Pollock's work "sustains the abstract-size scale toward which his vision has probably always been directed...