Word: pollocks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Your fine story succeeded in flushing out an old friend, co-worker and protagonist of Jackson Pollock's. It's me. I was a high school chum of Pollock's, later in 1930 we left Los Angeles for New York to broaden ourselves technically. We began a hard classic training at the Art Students League. To pay for our tuition and materials, we shared studios, worked as bus boys, garbage removers and dishwashers at the League cafeteria. School over, we hung up our respective shingles in the Village as professionals...
...expressionist movement. "We thought of this theme," said Ossorio, whose Reconciler is one of the exhibit's highlights, "because we knew that among our group many were trying to put on canvas the very essence of human experiencing. That is what we mean when we say [as Pollock used to] 'to get into the painting.' There is nothing detached or eccentric about our work. It is a total commitment, and once expressed on canvas, it represents the most vivid and dramatic expression of the human image possible-ourselves...
Once the three directors were convinced of the validity of their theme, they made a careful selection of artists, visited studios, often insisted on a particular painting. They decided on two free-form spontaneous doodles by the late Jackson Pollock, violent outbursts of vivid colors by Willem de Kooning, a melancholic mood piece by Grace Hartigan, harshly contrasting patterns by Richard Pousette-Dart. They added four morbidly humorous, squashed-face portraits by France...
...first of them all-the transitional figure-was Arshile Gorky, who early imitated Picasso, then the surrealists, finally broke through to a style of his own combining strange anatomical images and fragments of observed nature. Emerging early as the most noted was Pollock, hailed by some European painters and critics as the first great innovator in modern art since the birth of cubism-and hooted at by others. Wrote Critic John Russell in London's Sunday Times after seeing a Pollock painting in 1956: "I will not say that I was prejudiced against Mr. Pollock's picture...
From the splashes of Pollock and De Kooning to the finely executed color planes of Rothko. the movement has a wide range of identifiable styles. Each painter produces his own subjective expression without regard for what it communicates. The absence of any recognizable visual imagery has struck many critics and philosophers, like Theologian Paul Tillich, as a cult of meaninglessness, proof of "the emptiness of our existence in industrial society." Other critics have an entirely different perspective, see in the abstract-expressionist breakthrough the opening of a brave, new, unfettered world of art. Worcester Museum Director Daniel Catton Rich finds...