Word: pollocks
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...ever won such instant recognition-and evoked such instant outrage-as did Abstract Expressionism, the movement that sprang from the lofts of downtown Manhattan and the studios at the far tip of Long Island in the turbulent years after World War II. Its trademark was a photograph of Jackson Pollock, intently swirling skeins of paint from a stick onto a canvas laid flat on a floor. "The most powerful painter in contemporary America," declared Critic Clement Greenberg. "Chaos . . . wallpaper . . . an elaborate if meaningless tangle of cordage and smears," complained the more conventional commentators...
...show demonstrates, the major figures were highly individual artists. Perhaps their only unifying characteristic was exuberance-exuberance of size, exuberance of gesture. Instead of the carefully calculated stroke, there was the swirl of Pollock's drip paintings, the splattered brilliance of Willem de Kooning's terrifying women. Franz Kline's huge black-on-white compositions showed no more sophistication than a Chinese ideograph, but they conveyed the energy of the man that made them-and commanded a whole wall rather than a corner of a scroll. The smoldering color clouds of Mark Rothko drew a viewer...
...when not studying at the Art Students League. Arshile Gorky, the Armenian refugee, was initially a devotee of Ingres, Léger, Matisse, Cézanne and Kandinsky. Robert Motherwell drew much of his inspiration from Matisse. De Kooning, the Dutch immigrant, was closer to Cubism and de Stijl; Pollock, the shy Westerner, studied under Thomas Hart Benton, and was influenced by Mexico's David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. They all talked-and talked. Critic Thomas Hess observes that "a long, chaotic, brilliant, funny conversation about art began in the mid-1930s and continued for more...
...first comprehensive written attempts to limit the powers of the English King and to set forth the rights of his subjects. Lord Bryce, the historian, has described it as "the starting point in the constitutional history of the English race." In The History of English Law, Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland go even further. Magna Carta, they write, is "the nearest approach to an irrepealable 'fundamental statute' that England has ever...
...tastes so far-ranging that this month three Manhattan museums will be devoting much of their special display space to parts of his collections-which still puts no pressure on his reserves, or even denudes his private walls. A Kline may have had to be substituted for a Pollock here and there, but a rotation of pictures is often rewarding, as every housewife knows. For art lovers, the result is an unprecedented look at many treasures that have heretofore been visible only to friends dining at the Fifth Avenue apartment or visiting the family estate in Pocantico Hills...