Word: pollocks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Honest, I don't worship Jackson Pollock . . . Today it's almost impossible to worship anything except the creative expression of the self. This emphasis on individuality (not for its own sake) makes the work of the "abstract expressionists" meaningful-not in any basically different way from jazz, or certain aspects of American business before becoming institutionalized, etc. This vital American painting is not only an answer to greyflannelsuitism, but to art as propaganda (e.g., Russia today and Mexico yesterday). Its seemingly uncommunicative, antisocial, art-for-art's-sake implications are understandable in terms of the failure...
...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...
...Dripper. Adolph Gottlieb's Blue at Noon, for example, conveys a strong sense of light and dark skies and of lilting movement. Looking at it is rather like watching a snowstorm through a windowpane and remembering Thomas Nash's line: "Brightness falls from the air." Jackson Pollock's Scent is a heady specimen of what one worshiper calls his "personalized skywriting." More the product of brushwork than of Pollock's famed drip technique, it nevertheless aims to remind the observer of nothing except previous Pollocks, and quite succeeds in that modest design. All it says...
...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...