Word: pollocks
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...hyperconsciousness of the tribal is one of the functions of city life. Certainly it was for Pollock, and from it stemmed his abiding interest in the "totemic"--in mythic images that were either lost to modern, Euro-American culture or buried so far back in its origins that they seemed mysterious and exotic. Pollock in the late 1930s was a boy in deep emotional trouble, drinking like a fish and undergoing Jungian analysis. Like other Abstract Expressionists-to-be (Mark Rothko, for instance), he was on the lookout for archetypes and dark, unconsulted levels of feeling, in the hope that...
...Such was Pollock's problem. The picture in which he broke free from it--and, it now seems, took American art into a larger freedom with him--was the 20-ft.-wide mural he did for Peggy Guggenheim. He painted it in one outpouring rush, in a day and a night. Mural isn't by any means an abstract painting. It retains the essence of subject matter shared by most "classical" murals, from Giotto to Matisse--the projection of human figures on a large plane surface. But the movement isn't suave. The figures are arabesques, coiling, jammed together, recognizable...
...whole surface moving would have deep results for his later work, and afterimages of Mural would keep reappearing right up to the slanting "poles" in his last great canvas, Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952. The two pictures have something else in common: they remind you how Pollock, whom we tend to think of as a web-weaving, linear artist, was also a real colorist, idiosyncratic and original. There is something vulgar about the palette of Blue Poles, with its giddy dance of aluminum paint and hot orange, but it is the kind of vulgarity that fairly seethes with life...
...looked so unpromising at first attain this clarity, strength and command of scale? Not easily, and it is very much to the show's credit that it includes failures and partial successes along with the works that incontestably come off. It makes you more alert to the risks Pollock took. There were no rules for what he was doing; the besetting danger was always overcongestion of the surface, so that no air was left between the marks and the energy he strove to transmit clogged...
...need to be with these works very long before realizing how feeble a term "drip" is for the ways--the numberless, subtle and improvised ways--Pollock's paint got on the canvas. His public notoriety came in part from public resentment. Real artists lay watercolor washes or put glazes over body color, but this one just spilled liquids incontinently, as though painting were no more demanding than knocking over a cup of coffee or taking a pee. But when you look at these pictures, it isn't so. Pollock was a consummate aesthete. (The fact that he could also...