Word: pollocks
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...what of the work? Varnedoe's catalog essay bears the title "Comet: Jackson Pollock's Life and Work," which fits the eclat and brevity of Pollock's appearance. But comets eventually swing back on their orbit and return, whereas Pollock was a singular and not a cyclic event, more like a meteor that plows into the earth and wreaks havoc on its climate, filling art's air with fallout. Artists have been defining themselves and their work against Pollock ever since. Yet most of his influence was indirect. Pollock's mature style--based on dripping and flinging skeins of paint...
...Rather, Pollock became an exemplar of risk and openness. It wasn't just that, as de Kooning said, he "broke the ice" and forced American art onto an international stage, where it had never had a place before. It was that the freedom implied in his work challenged and provoked other artists to claim an equal freedom in theirs--not only in painting but also in sculpture, performance art, dance and music...
...Pollock was born in Cody, Wyo., in 1912 but grew up in California. Much ink has been spilled on the question of how Western an artist he was, how affected by the vast and epic landscapes he may or may not have noticed when he was two years old, but the point seems necessarily moot. In any case, he was not, as Europeans like to imagine, at home on the range, especially since Cody in 1912 was a new tract-housing development, not an Old West town. His father was a dud and a drifter who had little...
Benton became a surrogate big daddy to replace Pollock's own woundingly absent father. Thus the future avant-gardist had for a mentor a man who hated abstract art. But when Pollock came under Benton's tutelage, he wasn't aiming at abstraction. Benton's way of composing, with its heftily twisting figures and buckling, scoop-and-bump space, was based on 16th century Mannerism--Midwestern El Greco and Tintoretto; he even adapted the Mannerist device of reducing the figures to geometrical dolls, sometimes modeling them in clay. This vehemence, locked up as a system, appealed to Pollock...
Other influences besides Benton converged on him as well: the Mexican muralists of the '30s, especially Siquieros and Orozco; Picasso; Surrealism; Kandinsky; tribal art. As Varnedoe points out in his admirable catalog essay, if the notion that Pollock was some sort of cowboy isn't true, neither was he any kind of Indian. He'd seen Native American ceremonies and pictographs as a kid in Arizona, but his attachment to Indian art as a source of "primitive" authenticity came from museums and exhibitions in New York and was confirmed by other mentors he was acquiring, such as the painter John...