Word: pollock
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...only one effect on an artist's career: they stop it. But they can do wonders for reputation. We might feel different about Van Gogh if, instead of shooting himself in the gut at 37, he had died full of age and honors in bed. The demand for Jackson Pollock's least scribble might be less fierce if a skidding car had not sent him the way of James Dean. And what of Mark Rothko, who killed himself with a razor and pills in 1970? In hindsight, death appeared to be the central image of Rothko's late, dark, claustrophobic...
...first "grand" American style, mature abstract expressionism (painted from about 1950 onward) has been studied and shown almost to exhaustion. Shaped into an institution by the growing system of critics, dealers, curators and Government cultural agencies, the once fragile and isolated-looking works of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Gorky and their peers became the emblems of a cultural empire: no style or movement since surrealism was diffused so fast, or imposed itself as completely on painters around the world. But the earlier work of these artists, done before, during and just after World War II, is still patchily known. Last...
...real sense the abstract expressionists in their early years were like religious artists without a context, practicing a deeply felt but homeless (and culturally impossible) totemism. Some, like Pollock, drew direct inspiration from Southwest Indian art, transforming it-as in The Key, 1946-into the congested, baroque rhetoric of shape which would later be refined as the allover skeins and webs of his drip paintings. Still and Rothko regarded their art as mediumistic: it was, Still declared, a way of "being with in a revelation," and this kind of priestly bombast was a regular feature of abstract expressionist utterances. Painting...
...matter of getting into primitive fancy dress: all the painters involved were 20th century city dwellers, they had read Freud and Jung, some of them (notably Pollock) had been in analysis, and they were well aware that the "savage mind" cannot be mimicked by an act of will. The only form of primitivism available to modern man, their paintings argue in different voices, is the unconscious. Just as the young bourgeois intellectuals who formed surrealism turned their revolt against their own class into something like a religious principle, so the New York painters declared their separation from American materialism...
...hindsight, one can easily see where they got their language: how Gorky's spidery, fluent line emerged from Miro, how the bulging shapes of early de Kooning derive from '30s Picasso, what Rothko got from Max Ernst and Pollock from Kandinsky, and how deeply Adolph Gottlieb's pictographs were influenced by Victor Brauner. But that is perhaps of secondary importance. What counts most in this show is the spectacle of those obscure but desperately committed artists painting as though art had the power to change life, as though culture itself depended on their efforts: which...