Word: pollocks
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...period divides into two sub-movements. Gestural painters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline energized their canvases with wild brushstrokes, and textured their surfaces by building up their paint. The color-field painters, notably Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, articulated their sufaces with two or three areas of unruffled color...
...Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline are among the other major abstract expressionists shown. The lineup of artists is quite good, reading like a veritable Who's Who of the period. The work which represents them in this show is, however, another story. Jackson Pollock is a case in point. The Fogg owns a very good example of Pollock's mature or "drip" work (1947-53), but it is not on exhibit here because it's now in Washington D.C.--on loan to the National Gallery...
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...
DIED. Harold Rosenberg, 72, author (Saul Steinberg, Barnett Newman) and art critic of The New Yorker; of a stroke, in Springs, N.Y. Rosenberg's essays on Pollock, de Kooning, Gorky, Motherwell and Rothko, whom he called action painters, helped legitimize the first New York school of abstract expressionism...