Word: pollocks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Replacing it is "Figure" an example from Pollock's "myth and totem" period which preceded his "drip" style and coincided with his experiences in Jungian analysis. This work which incorporates primitivesque figures and symbols reminds us that Pollock did not spend his entire artistic career dripping paint on canvas on his way to fame, fortune and artistic fulfillment. But even if "Figure" provides a good academic lesson, any show of abstract expressionist work is incomplete, as this one proves, without a mature Pollock to epitomize the nature and aims of the period--an expression of the unconscious through the emotional...
...show has problems but this is largely due to holes in the Fogg's collection. Both the Hoffman and the Motherwells are weak and the absence of the Pollock doesn't help things either. In addition, the show suffers from a lack of any work by Barnett Newman, a major figure on the color-field side of abstract expression. Though the Mark Rothko is an example of this school, it hardly compensates for Newman's absence. On the positive side, the show is well exhibited, and it is a nice surprise to see what the Fogg can fish...