Word: pollock
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...Pollock's widow, Lee Krasner, stuns with controlled anger
...Krasner is finally getting her due, and the power of received ideas in American taste is so strong that not too many people sense what the due is. Everyone, of course, has heard of her late husband, Jackson Pollock, the mythic hero (one still reads such inflationary phrases) of abstract expressionism. But Krasner's painting is less well known, the proof being that she is only now getting her first full retrospective. Curated by Art Historian Barbara Rose, it opened late last month at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts: 152 paintings and drawings, the distillation...
...what hid her? The vicissitudes of life with Pollock, whom she married in 1945, do not explain that. It was a match easily caricatured: the growing fame of the male painter overwhelms the more vulnerable mate, his penumbra dims her light, his demands blot out her needs. This scenario is a fiction. Pollock's talent did not use up all the oxygen in the room. If he had married someone with a less acerbic and combative temper than
...Rubens. To those whose idea of modernism was modeled on Oedipal battle, that was not enough. Hence the feeling, not yet dispelled in all quarters of the art world, that Motherwell was too French, too fluent, not hard enough on himself or his viewers. Unlike such Nietzschean contemporaries as Pollock and Still, he was (dreaded word!) "elegant," and the fact that the blackness, raggedness and restrained violence of many of his paintings invoked the tragic only made matters worse...
...make a culture of congestion work, and turn constriction to advantage? The main cultural myth of America centers on infinite space, limitless resources, and the energies they foster. Without these, such diverse cultural emblems as Moby Dick, '50s tail fins, westerns and the paintings of Jackson Pollock would not exist. Neither would those words in the Declaration of Independence, so bizarre to the Japanese, about pursuing happiness. When they find their space is finite, their resources limited and their social energy grossly deformed by the friction of overcrowding, Americans get confused and resentful; they see the world in terms...