Synopsis:
This book accompanies the first retrospective exhibition in over 30 years of the most influential American painter of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's "drip technique" had made him one of the central figures of the New York based Abstract Expressionists. Eliminating all recognizable imagery and painterly techniques, Pollock dripped paint from a stick or can, resulting in a web of interlacing lines that created all-over images of richness and complexity. The myth suggests that he worked in a drunken, haphazard fashion; this mythology has now been reassessed. The essay by Varnedoe examines how the legend of Pollock the "action painter" has been constructed. He charts the development of Pollock's aesthetic and situates it within its art and historical context. A second essay, by Pepe Karmel, provides insight into the "drip technique", revealed through an intensive, computer-assisted study of photographs amd films of Pollock at work. Sixty documentary photographs illustrate this essay.
Review:
The almost mythic Jackson Pollock--a roughshod, ill-mannered, prodigiously ambitious, aggressive, alcoholic, tormented artist--is alive and unwell in this book. But Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, the chief curator and adjunct assistant curator, respectively, of the New York Museum of Modern Art's Department of Painting and Sculpture, also go deeply into Pollock's art in eye-opening ways. This book is the catalogue for the retrospective of Pollock's art-shattering oeuvre at the New York Museum of Modern Art in the autumn of 1998 and London's Tate Gallery in the spring of 1999. It includes many biographical pictures as well as colour plates of Pollock's paintings, from the awkward but earnest early works to the late, great, famous canvases. Varnedoe's essay, aptly titled "Comet: Jackson Pollock's Life and Work," deftly invites the reader into Pollock's world, starting with his country studio: "The structure, often called a barn, is in fact more like a glorified tool shed." Karmel's essay, "Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth," is a truly groundbreaking exploration of Pollock's technique. Karmel has scrutinised every frame of every piece of film, still or moving, ever taken of Pollock painting. He arrives at absolutely original conclusions: Pollock's all-over swirls of dripped and flung paint often began as figurative works and clearly relate to such all-American stalwarts as Thomas Hart Benton. Karmel makes countless other sharp observations, noting the difference, for example, between fast-looking marks and the slow, deliberate movements with which they were made (and vice versa). His essay is a work of brilliant scholarship, written thrillingly, and it will forever change the way any serious viewer looks at Pollock's paintings. It makes this volume absolutely essential for understanding the work of this great, sad artist. --Peggy Moorman
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