Word: pollocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...superfluous to say that Pollock is one of the legends of modern art. American culture never got over its surprise at producing him; fairly or not, he remains the prototypical American modernist, the one who not only "broke the ice"-in the generous words of his colleague Willem de Kooning-but set a canon of intensity for generations to come. The sad fact seems to be that no younger American artist, in the 25 years since his death, has quite got past Pollock's achievement. His work was mined and sifted by later artists as though he were...
Still, if Claes Oldenburg dribbled sticky floods of enamel over his hamburgers and plaster cakes in the '60s. he did so in homage to Pollock. If a sculptor like Richard Serra made sculpture by throwing molten lead to splash in a corner, or Barry Le Va scattered ball bearings and metal slugs on the floor of the Whitney Museum, the source of their gestures was not hard to find. Distorted traces of Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers which, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his. Certainly Pollock scorned decor. He was not interested...
...what his imitators could never do, and why there are no successful Pollock forgeries; they always end up spaghetti, looking like whereas vomit, or Pollock-in onyx, or his best work, at any rate-had an almost preternatural control over the total effect of those skeins and receding depths of paint. In them, the light is always right. Nor are they absolutely spontaneous: he would often retouch the drip with a brush. So one is obliged to speak of Pollock in terms of a perfected visual taste, analogous to natural pitch in music-a far cry, indeed, from the familiar...
...Pollock's refinement is not the whole story. His best paintings (like all serious art) are triumphs of sublimation, but they leave no doubt of the strength of feeling he had to control. From the very first, when he was trying-in studies like Composition with Figures and Banners, circa 1934-38-to find painted form for the violently energetic, twisting, flamelike movement of large masses, Pollock was obsessed by energy. His great theme, one might say, was the dissolution of matter into energy under extreme stress. He did not approach this by some corny process of finding painted...
...Pollock's early work is permeated by the forms of mannerist contrapposto, the serpentine figures of 16th century art, and there is more than just an echo of the strange excavated space of El Greco's paintings, simultaneously vast and womblike, in his work after 1947. Because of his aspirations to sublimity, it is difficult to assimilate Pollock-as some authorities have wished to do-to the traditions of the School of Paris. The French painter he most admired, the surrealist André Masson, was set against the pre-eminently French virtues of lucidity, calm...